Back from Summer Hibernation

(with a new tool (NOW FIXED) for corporate accountability)

[UPDATE: some bugs in the they-own-what tool have been fixed. try again!]

I had a busy summer and fell out of my routine of putting my angry rants about Gaza and the ongoing class war to writing. When you're juggling life and parenting and obsessively coding on-the-side, something's got to give, and apparently that something was my regular doses of righteous indignation delivered to your inboxes.

But I haven't been idle. I've been building something.

When I was practicing law, I spent a lot of time litigating housing discrimination cases. I'd sue what appeared to be small LLCs that owned just a handful of properties, maybe a slum here, a problem building there. Standard stuff: bad landlord owns a few units, tenants suffer, lawyer files suit.

Except that's not actually what was happening.

These "small" LLCs were actually tentacles of much larger business networks. The same handful of investors, often based out of state, were operating dozens of shell companies, buying up properties across Connecticut, and systematically extracting wealth from our communities while hiding behind layers of corporate structure designed to obscure their true scope and impact.

How do you fight an enemy you can't even identify?

my passion project became building a tool to map these networks automatically. I wanted to connect the dots between business registrations, property ownership records, and the people pulling the strings. I wanted to make the invisible visible.

The current iteration of this project lives at theyownwhat.net. It's built on Connecticut's public data — business registries, property records, principal filings— and uses algorithms to trace the connections between entities that would otherwise remain hidden. Search for a business or property owner, and watch as the system reveals the broader network of companies, principals, and properties they're actually connected to.

It's not perfect, it's not pretty, but it works. When corporate power feels more opaque than ever, sometimes you need to build your own damn tools.

More angry rants to follow, I promise. in the meantime, poke around and see what networks you can uncover!