Along with Ashcroft's expanded reach on terror and spying, come concerns...and not just from the left.

Even some of his conservative peers complain that Mr. Ashcroft may have grown too powerful. To his critics, Mr. Ashcroft is a Big Brother figure: an attorney general whose expanding scope has allowed the Justice Department to use wiretaps, backroom decisions, and an expanded street presence to spy on ordinary Americans, read their e-mail messages, or monitor their library checkouts, all in the name of fighting terrorism. And the department's consideration of proposals that could give it still greater, secret counterterrorism authority has provoked a fresh round of concerns.

Among Ashcroft's contributions are these:

He has given agents new powers to spy on possible terrorists, detain suspects and look for patterns that could predict terrorist attacks. He has centralized power at the Justice Department among a small inner circle of political appointees, frustrating some career officials and prosecutors in the field who complain that the attorney general has undercut their authority in order to further his own agenda. And, working with the White House, he and his aides have pushed for a more conservative ideology on the judiciary and on appellate issues like the Michigan affirmative action case being considered by the Supreme Court.

This is a very long article, we recommend reading the whole thing. It contains far more praise for Ashcroft than we like to see in a news article, but it also presents some of the criticism. It is distressing to see how Ashcroft and his supporters justify the erosion of our rights in the name of fighting terrorism when so few of his proposals are likely to be effective in making us safer.