Federal judges are using the little known "terrorism enhancement" power – which allows them to tack years onto sentences for crimes considered to be terrorism – in cases that arguably aren't terrorist attacks, according to Shane Harris, National Journal's enterprising national security reporter. Harris pored over court records to look at how judges use the power to sometimes triple the jail time of people convicted of crimes that already come with stiff penalties.

There’s no doubt about it: Daniel McGowan is a criminal. In January 2001, he stood lookout while other members of a radical environmentalist group set fire to the offices of the Superior Lumber Co. in the tiny southwestern Oregon town of Glendale. In statement issued after the fire, McGowan justified the after-hours assault, calling Superior “a typical earth raper contributing to the ecological destruction of the Northwest.” Five months later, in the northern town of Clatskanie, McGowan and others torched a farm that grew hybrid poplar-cottonwood trees, which they denounced in another public message as “an ecological nightmare threatening native biodiversity in the ecosystem.” At the scene, McGowan painted the letters ELF, the acronym of the Earth Liberation Front, an underground band of economic saboteurs responsible for a string of arsons across the Northwest and in Colorado and Wyoming. McGowan, fully committed to ELF’s violent tactics, caused more than $2 million in property damage. He is, by the letter of the law and by his own admission of involvement in the two fires, an arsonist.

But is Daniel McGowan a terrorist? As far as the law is concerned, yes. Last month, a U.S. District Court judge in Eugene, Ore., ruled that McGowan set the fire at the tree farm to intimidate state governments. Specifically, the Clatskanie statement had declared, “Pending legislation in Oregon and Washington further criminalizing direct action in defense of the wild will not stop us and only highlights the fragility of the ecocidal empire.” That one sentence, the judge found, showed that McGowan meant to influence the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, a particular legal standard that elevated his crime from simple arson to terrorism. Under the law, that gave the judge the authority to increase McGowan’s sentence to life in prison. In the end, however, she gave him seven years for his role in the arsons, partly because McGowan helped to persuade his co-conspirators to plead guilty.