For decades, corporations have known everything about your spending while you knew nothing about their pricing. That gap is where Complex Corporate Corruption does its work. CCI is a civic software framework that inverts the asymmetry: an engine that reads the prices buyers actually paid against the lines the law already draws, measures the part no public input explains, and seals every finding as evidence a regulator can check. In its finished form it runs passively, on records that arrive on their own, and no resident has to submit, sign up or press anything.
cci-node // passive intake feed
cci --explain thesis
The market runs on information you don't have
Every price you see is the output of a machine that knows your income bracket, your purchase history, your willingness to pay, and the exact moment your need becomes urgent. You see one number. The machine sees all of them. That gap is asymmetric information, and for the party that holds it, the gap is the product.
CCI is built on a single inversion. The records a market already produces, read together and read continuously, show more about a price than the company that set it chooses to share. Listing pages are public. The RESALE Act makes high-volume ticket resellers keep original and final prices for three years and opens exchanges' records to inspection. A first sale can carry a sealed commitment to its own price. Read side by side, those records show whether a price followed a real input, a sold-out show or a closing date, or followed the buyer.
Pooling what residents see would make a population vulnerable to breaches, to sale and to subpoena, so CCI is designed to need none of it. Every test runs on prices, times and the law's lines, and no test needs a buyer's identity. The first runs take receipts that buyers choose to send. The finished engine runs passively, on records that arrive without anyone sending them.
cci --module extraction-fingerprint
The extraction fingerprint
A fair price moves when its inputs move. A ticket costs more as a sold-out show draws near, and a ride costs more after the last train has gone. CCI measures that part and sets it aside. What it hunts for is the remainder, the part of a price that no public input explains. The premium a buyer pays splits in two: S(t), the acute part, is what the moment explains, and D(u), the discrete part, is what the seller, the buyer or the platform adds. A market priced by demand puts most of the variance in S(t). A market priced by who is selling, who is buying or which platform shows the price puts it in D(u), and that divergence is the fingerprint of extraction.
FIG-01 // THE LINESprice paid vs. fair basis and lawful room
Price paid Fair basis and the law's line Line crossed
The fair basis B comes from the market's own records: for a ride, the posted rate card; for a ticket, the total of its first sale. Under the RESALE Act a resale price may run to 1.10 × B and a marketplace fee to 0.10 × B. A price over a line is a bright line finding, and one record with a verified basis proves it. The shaded gap is the legal excess, and only completed sales count toward restitution.
Coordination leaves its own mark. Independent sellers price on their own costs and their own timing. When sellers holding one section of a venue reprice together, minutes apart, and their prices collapse toward one multiple above the line, the engine flags convergence. Three more pattern tests read the same records: one seat priced differently for different buyers in the same minute, reprices faster than any input moved, and wide spreads on identical seats. A pattern builds an inference across many records, and it goes out as a referral.
FIG-02 // CONVERGENCEsellers repricing in lockstep
Three sellers, one move and no input to explain it. Invisible to any single buyer, and plain to an engine reading all three listings at once. Sent as a referral.
cci --module intake --passive
Records that arrive on their own
A detection network needs a steady flow of records, and residents are the wrong source for it. Asking people to scan, upload and claim makes the network as strong as its most tired user. CCI draws its records from places the market and the law already create, and they arrive whether or not anyone opens an app.
⚠ Listing captured
Price, fee, total
A public listing page, time-stamped on a schedule. Charges itemized, original price shown or missing.
Price line test →
✓ Basis on record
First-sale total
Committed by the issuer at the first sale and carried with the ticket through every resale.
Commitment checked →
✓ Paired quote
Two profiles, one listing
The District's registered test profiles quote the same listing seconds apart.
Public listings
Listing pages are public. Captured on a schedule, each snapshot records the price, the fee, the total shown, whether the charges are itemized and whether the original price appears. A reprice becomes a new row under the same listing.
Records the law already requires
High-volume resellers must keep original and final prices for three years, and exchanges must keep their records open to inspection under D.C. Code 47-2890.04. Issuers can commit to each ticket's first-sale total at the moment of sale. Where a basis is missing, the engine reports a data gap and estimates nothing.
The District's own test profiles
The surveillance-pricing test needs no shopper's data. Registered test profiles that differ in one attribute, a ZIP code band or a device, quote the same listing seconds apart, and an exact sign test keeps chance from counting as a pattern.
Nobody signs up. The records build the case.
cci --module privacy-core --verbose
Intelligence without collectible data
The system is designed so that its operator, whether a city, a department or a trust, holds only what the check needs. A ticket's first-sale price can be proved without being shown, one finding can be proved without the rest of the ledger, and no test ever reads a buyer's name. An audit of surveillance pricing that ran on surveillance would defeat its own purpose.
FIG-03 // PROOF FLOWproof, not data
At the first sale
Commitment
The issuer hashes the ticket ID, the total in cents and a random salt. The hash travels with the ticket.
▶
At resale
Range proof
The reseller proves its price is at most 1.10 × the committed basis without revealing the basis.
▶
To the District
Sealed packet
The finding, its records' hashes and its Merkle path. One packet proves its place in the run.
// what a subpoena of the engine returns:
buyer identityNULL, no test needs one
first-sale pricea committed hash, opened only for the regulator
seller recorddid:cci:7f3a…e91c, tied to a resale license
sealed runone Merkle root, filed with DLCP when the run is made
Sellers, platforms and test profiles sign their records with keys tied to Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), so a record's origin can be proved without a name in the payload. Each run is sealed under one Merkle root, and changing one price in one record changes the root. The prototype checks the range claim by opening the commitment to the verifier, and a zero-knowledge backend such as Bulletproofs over Pedersen commitments goes behind the same interface before any reseller is asked to prove compliance privately.
cci --deploy --phase markets
From one market to the next
The engine carries from market to market because the method does: a fair basis from the market's own records, the lines the law draws from it, the tests, the split and the seal. Each new market brings its own records and its own rules, and shares patterns, not people.
FIG-04 // MARKETSone method, three markets
Market
Fair basis
Stage
Ride-share
Lyft's posted DC rate card
Calibration. The engine reproduced the reading of one rider's 58 rides in The Klando Cartel.
Resale tickets
Each ticket's first-sale total
The protocol for the RESALE Act, whose lines apply from 1 January 2027, tested on a synthetic market. Synthetic
Grocery and household goods
The shelf price posted for every shopper
Next. Maryland's ban on personal-data grocery prices took effect on 1 October 2026.
The method is the product. Autonomous Consulting follows it from the ride to the ticket to the grocery shelf.
cci --audit --honest
What this can and can't do
A manifesto that hides its own limits is just marketing. Selling this vision honestly means stating plainly where the engineering is solid, where the claims are projections, and where the law constrains what software can promise.
AUDIT // CONSTRAINTSread before deploying
Subpoena exposure
Commitments, DIDs and sealed packets let the engine avoid holding names, so there is far less to surrender. Metadata, network logs and platform records can still persist outside the proof layer, and courts can compel what exists. The claim is radical data minimization: holding so little that a subpoena returns little of value.
Patterns as referrals
Lockstep reprices are a strong statistical signal. Shared pricing software or shared public information can also move prices together, and antitrust law requires evidence of agreement. A pattern marks where to look, and the District's lawyers and the court decide what it means.
Thresholds and the synthetic market
The pattern thresholds came from one rider's records and a synthetic market, and every run records the values it used. A synthetic market shows that the engine finds what it was built to find. How often these things happen in the District takes real listings after 1 January 2027.
Passive intake and its gaps
Passive operation depends on records that flow. Until issuers commit at the first sale and exchanges report, the basis comes from reseller records and receipts, and every missing basis is a data gap the engine reports and leaves open.
Adaptive adversaries
Any detection system invites evasion: staggered price moves, noise injection, test profiles spotted and shown a clean price. The engine's advantage is structural, many records read together, and that advantage has to be defended continuously. That is, after all, what the first word in its name is for.
cci --status
The glass box economy
Today
Asymmetric Information
The firm sees everything. You see one price and take it.
⟶
The target state
Symmetric Intelligence
The records show the pattern. Every price over a line reaches a regulator sealed.
CCI removes the darkness that Complex Corporate Corruption depends on. When every price over a line arrives on a regulator's desk as a sealed packet, with the records, the rule and the arithmetic attached, the cost of extraction rises until fairness becomes the only profitable strategy left. The engine reports, and the District's lawyers and the courts decide. It is a mechanism that makes the unfair economy stop paying.
