“
Thursday morning, Xu attends a biweekly “Police Cloud” meeting. The goal of this much-ballyhooed big data system is to take information the government routinely collects on its citizens—birthplace, address, occupation, family relations, religious affiliation—and integrate it with hotel and travel records, CCTV footage, biometrics, consumer information, medical history, and even one’s shopping habits, to predict and stop crime before it happens.
”
”