| The ongoing advancement of digital technologies is fundamentally reshaping the generation and assessment logic of criminal suspicion. Traditionally, suspicion has been assessed through law enforcement officers’ direct observation of specific conduct, coupled with inferential reasoning grounded in their professional experience. However, the widespread adoption of big data analytics and artificial intelligence has restructured the informational basis of suspicion, extending it beyond concrete case-specific facts to more widespread information of outside. This shift manifests in the transformation and merger of suspicion from an individual-based to a group-based orientation, from natural persons to digital identities, from concrete factual indicators to predictive intelligence, and from human to machine-mediated rationality. While such developments promise enhanced efficiency of investigation and the ability of crime discovery, they also give rise to what may be termed the dilution of suspicion. This dilution weakens the role of suspicion as a core regulatory threshold for initiating coercive state interventions, thereby generating systemic tensions with procedural safeguards and fundamental rights protections. To address these challenges, it is necessary to recalibrate existing procedural frameworks by incorporating information density as a complementary evaluative dimension of suspicion. A layered filtering mechanism should be established to ensure proportionality and coherence between the assessment of suspicion and the procedural actions and decisions. In doing so, the criminal justice system can promote the responsible integration of digital technologies into suspicion assessment and criminal prosecution, while preserving procedural legitimacy and institutional integrity amidst ongoing digital transformation. |
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