China Tries Its Hand At Pre-Crime (bloomberg.com)

schwit1 writes: China's effort to flush out threats to stability is expanding into an area that used to exist only in dystopian sci-fi: pre-crime. The Communist Party has directed one of the country's largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur. "It's very crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror," Wu Manqing, the chief engineer for the military contractor, told reporters at a conference in December. "But what is more important is to predict the upcoming activities." The program is unprecedented because there are no safeguards from privacy protection laws and minimal pushback from civil liberty advocates and companies, says Lokman Tsui, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has advised Google on freedom of expression and the Internet.

Comments

Re:Can't protect what you don't have

[Tablizer]

Based on past behavior, the US gov't probably does the same, but doesn't tell anybody. They'll use some creative interpreting of a vague word in the law to justify it if somebody spills the beans, like they've done in the past with phone meta-data.

The only real difference is that the US has to be more clandestine about it among their population to avoid raising suspicion. The Chinese government WANTS their citizens to be suspicious and paranoid, it's how they keep them "in line".

I actually don't have a big problem with this...

[mark-t]

... as long as they don't actually arrest someone who hasn't actually committed a crime yet. At most, perhaps, it may invite a reason to launch an investigation, and possibly attempt to create additional safeguards for the possibility that a crime might occur at some point in the future, but the future is inherently unknowable(*), andd it would be hugely unjust to punish someone for a crime that they hadn't actually committed.

* For example, I could make a machine that outputs 1 if you input 0 and outputs 0 if you input 1. The inputs and outputs are both finite, and do not require any significant calculations to be done about the future, but if the future were actually knowable, then it would also be possible to provide whatever was predicted as the machine's output (a single bit) as its input (also a single bit). The result is, of course, a paradox of the same type as the halting problem, and since it is known to be possible to build a machine that outputs the opposite of its input (asm NOT instruction anyone?), the only possibility is that it is not generally possible to know the future of even a very simple deterministic system, let alone a hugely complicated system like the universe. (Note that this does not mean the universe is not deterministic, it may very well be... it only suggests that the future is not fully knowable... which interestingly also suggests that any so-called illusion of free will can be indistinguishable from what we might otherwise consider to be genuine free will, and so the illusion may as well be called free will anyways).