Security certificates infer terrorist identity from association and history rather than acts

Evidence

In certificate hearings, a number of markers indicate who holds the ideology of an Islamic extremist. First, an Islamic extremist is someone who has participated in ‘Jihad,’ understood principally as participation in anti-Soviet activities in Afghanistan during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He (no women have the label) has had either a direct or indirect association with Osama bin Laden or others who associated with him. These associations need not be close, and sometimes merely agreeing with some of Bin Laden’s criticisms of the West will suffice to raise a red flag. Anyone who is involved, however peripherally, in activities that are likely to be of some use to terrorist organizations, for example, passport forgery, is suspect. Finally, any associations with Muslim countries or people are red flags. Terrorists have these histories. Any individual with this history must be a terrorist. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 96

Categorization

• SEED: The bare facts of this profile — mere agreement with bin Laden’s criticisms, NGO work in a Muslim country — could anchor an essay on how counterterrorism law converts ordinary biography into suspicion.
• XREF: Erases the gap between ‘has this history’ and ‘is a terrorist’ — echoes the Inquisition logic from paragraph 95 that any life can be reconstructed to fit the profile. Also connects to Agamben’s state of exception and to my knowledge base on how ‘profile’ conflates category membership with guilt. — connects to: Terrorism becomes the pretext for demanding automated certainty machines — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1228