Security hearings punish latent identity-based capacity rather than committed acts

Evidence

In security-certificate cases, CSIS establishes who possesses ‘Islamic extremist’ ideology. Once marked as bearing the stain of disloyalty and violence associated with this ideology, a detainee can hardly challenge the determination owing not only to secret evidence but also to the very amorphousness of a charge built on latent qualities. The ‘crime’ in security cases is not a crime but something born in the blood or the psyche, a hidden indicator of a latent capacity to be violent. Because the capacity to be violent is an internal quality, people are condemned for what they might do (based on who they are) and not for what they have done. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 94

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the security ‘crime’ as an internal latent quality versus a committed act — a key conceptual clarification.
• XREF: Echoes the Inquisition’s purity-of-blood logic and connects to my existing work on how classifications function through latent markers rather than observable behavior.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Pre-crime as purity law’ — how latent-capacity prosecutions revive blood-stain logic under modern security regimes.