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Terror War? What Terror War?
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

...Now Tom Ridge is proving me right, with a new plan to pervert Homeland Security from its antiterror mission to an unrelated one: "The initiative, dubbed Operation Predator, will target pornographers, child prostitution rings, Internet predators, immigrant smugglers and other criminals."

What can we learn from this? Two things. One is that the Department of Homeland Security apparently thinks the War on Terror isn't important enough to occupy its full energies anymore, and that -- in the interest of bureaucratic survival -- it's branching out into the kind of operations that have generally been associated with, well, ordinary law enforcement, even if the targets, in this case, are foreigners.

I suppose that should be a relief, since it suggests that, at least in Tom Ridge's mind, we have little to fear from Osama's ilk anymore. On the other hand, I'm not comforted, because it proves that lesson two is alive and well: any powers confided to bureaucrats in the service of vital objectives will quickly be abused in the service of other, less important purposes.

Back when the Department of Homeland Security was first being discussed, we were told that such a department was necessary to ensure cooperation among diverse federal law enforcement agencies. Critics and skeptics feared that it would soon be turned from an antiterror agency into a general purpose federal police force, something that Americans have traditionally rejected. Ridge's mission-creep has made clear that the critics and skeptics were right all along....