Last week, the Justice Department released a 31-page report detailing its usage of the controversial Patriot Act, specifically defending its broad new powers by outlining individual cases solved with the help of its new authority, leading the casual reader to believe that such powers are indispensable in the fight against terrorism.

Although the Justice Department’s newfound openness is a welcome change of pace, there’s just one problem: Many of the cases cited of the Patriot Act’s indispensable nature aren’t about terrorism at all.

For example, in outlining the usage of section 210 (which allows for agents to subpoena individual records from Internet service providers), the report cites four cases in which authorities captured child pornography distributors — of course, what’s missing is how exactly this relates to preventing terrorism.

Nor is there a link in the case in which agents used the powers of the Patriot Act to find: a hacker group planning a denial-of-service attack on several Internet service providers, a West Virginia man who kidnapped and sexually assaulted his estranged wife, a credit card scam designed to capture individuals’ credit card numbers, a 13-year-old girl kidnapped from her western Pennsylvania home, and an 88-year old woman in Wisconsin who was kidnapped and held for ransom.

Also noticeably absent in the official report were numerous accounts of how the intelligence-gathering provisions have been used to harass groups such as anti-war activists, among others.

The disturbing trend evolving here is that the act so hastily passed by Congress under the guise of an essential tool to fighting terrorists has at best been revealed to be little more than the long-standing law enforcement wish list that critics termed it shortly after its passage.

Defenders of the Patriot Act would be wise to take a lesson from the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, more commonly known as the RICO Act. What was created to be used by law enforcement as a weapon against Mafia-oriented crime syndicates was instead perverted into an act used to harass individuals and political protest groups.

Most prominent among these targets were radical anti-abortion groups charged under the act for blocking access to abortion clinics. Under the law, not only could individual protestors be charged, but their supporting organizations as well. By comparison, the act itself was rarely used to prosecute Mafia figures.

Conservatives who dismiss the abuses of the Patriot Act in the present would be well-advised to heed the example of the RICO Act when it comes to laws that go well beyond the scope of their original mandate — such laws have nasty and surprising ways of coming back to haunt their own interests.