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Administration Pulls Back on Surveillance Agreement Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January. Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants. As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States. But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants. During a hearing Tuesday of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. McConnell was asked by Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, whether he could promise that the administration would no longer sidestep the court when seeking warrants. “Sir, the president’s authority under Article II is in the Constitution,” Mr. McConnell said. “So if the president chose to exercise Article II authority, that would be the president’s call.”....

Record Number of Secret Warrants in 2006 A secret court approved all but one of the government's requests last year to search or eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and spies, according to Justice Department data released Tuesday. In all, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court signed off on 2,176 warrants targeting people in the United States believed to be linked to international terror organizations or spies. The record number is more than twice as many as were issued in 2000, the last full year before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. One application was denied in part, and 73 required changes before being approved. The disclosure was mandated as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration's sweeping anti-terror law. It was released as a Senate intelligence panel examined changes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that could let the government more easily monitor homegrown terrorists. But in its three-page public report, sent to Senate and House leaders, the Justice Department said it could not yet provide data on how many times the FBI secretly sought telephone, Internet and banking records about U.S. citizens and residents without court approval. The department is still compiling those numbers amid an internal investigation of the FBI's improper — and in some cases illegal — use of so-called national security letters. The letters are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge's approval....

States Wiretap Far More Often Than Feds State investigators listened in on more than 3 million phone conversations last year as local prosecutors sought a record number of wiretaps, mostly to investigate drug crimes. As the federal government has focused its resources on national security investigations, the responsibility for drug investigations — the focus of 80 percent of wiretaps — has fallen to state and local authorities. A decade ago, federal and state investigators sought about the same number of wiretaps. Last year, state prosecutors obtained nearly three times as many wiretap authorizations as their federal counterparts: 1,378 to 461, according to an annual report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Before tapping someone's phone, prosecutors must persuade a judge there is probable cause to believe the person is breaking the law. No federal or state judge denied such a request last year. Of the more than 15,000 applications filed in the last decade, only five were denied. Technological advances have made it easier for local investigators to tap telephones and cell phones....

Privacy Laws Slow Efforts on Gun-Buyer Data Momentum is building in Congress behind a measure that would push states to report their mental health records to the federal database used to conduct background checks on gun buyers. But a thicket of obstacles, most notably state privacy laws, have thwarted repeated efforts to improve the reporting of such records in the past and are likely to complicate this latest effort, even after the worst mass shooting in United States history at Virginia Tech last month. Federal law prohibits anyone who has been adjudicated as a “mental defective,” as well as anyone involuntarily committed to a mental institution, from buying a firearm. But only 22 states now submit any mental health records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, against which all would-be gun purchasers must be checked. The erratic reporting is a problem to which gun-control advocates, law enforcement officials and others have sought to draw attention for years. “We’ve had these wake-up calls for years, and all we ever do is push the snooze button,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The federal system, in fact, contained only about 235,000 mental health records as of January 2006, even though it is estimated that as many as 2.7 million people have been involuntarily institutionalized nationwide....