Sam Leith Sam Leith

Pre-crime has arrived in China

The surveillance systems inside China’s camps, where countless Muslims are systematically dehumanised, are largely developed in Seattle, says Darren Byler

(Getty) 
issue 29 January 2022

The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film based on it. Here was a vision of a shudderingly paranoiac technological dystopia in which you could be arrested for something you haven’t even done yet. Not so science-fictional as all that.

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