Preemptive Strike

Profiling - Big Brother Runamuck
Law enforcement agencies in Washington D.C. have begun to use technology that they say can predict when crimes will be committed and who will commit them, before they actually happen. The pre-crime software has been developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Previous incarnations of the software, already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia were limited to predictions of murders by and among parolees and offenders on probation. According to a report by ABC News, however, the latest version, to be implemented in Washington D.C., can predict other future crimes as well.
Critics have urged that the program encourages categorizing individuals on a risk scale via computer mathematics, rather than on real life, and that monitoring those people based on such a premise is antithetic to a justice system founded on the premise of the presumption of innocence.
Other forms of pre-crime technology in use or under development include surveillance cameras that can predict when a crime is about to occur and alert police, and even neurological brain scanners that can read people’s intentions before they act, thus detecting whether or not a person has “hostile intent”.