"Work expands so far as to fill the time available for its solution".
So said Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson over fifty years ago when he formulated his famous "Parkinson's Law" of Bureaucratic Self-Aggrandizement" which described the genius of bureaucracies to find and failing that to invent work to justify ever larger budgets.
He had in mind the British civil service and royal navy.
But he could have been describing the increasing practice documented in this feature in the current Rolling Stone of using covert informants to help gin up and promote potential terror conspiracies where none existed, in order to bring terror related prosecutions to court.
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