'The Perfect Police State' Paints A Picture Of The Surveillance China Uses To Monitor Uyghurs

Have you ever seen the movie "Minority Report?"

The film is about a special police force in the future that does what's called "preventive policing," using psychics and technology to predict who will commit a crime.

China appears to have developed a version of this, according to investigative reporter Geoffrey Cain. In his new book "The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future," he tells the story of China's vast surveillance system used against ethnic minority Muslims in the western part of the country.

Cain begins the book with the phrase that the targets of the surveillance call "the situation." He says "the situation" is how people from the Uyghur ethnic group describe their life without having to reveal too much in front of the authorities.

"If you’re living under the situation, what that means is that your entire life is surveilled 24/7 by the state, nonstop by cameras, by artificial intelligence, by a predictive policing system that predicts whether or not you’ll commit a crime in the future," Cain says.

The mass database is called the IJOP — the Integrated Joint Operations Platform — which is a police platform that nudges officers when it believes someone is prone to committing an act of terror. The person is then visited