The executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, Lucy Dalglish, said the government's reported acquisition of journalists' calling records was part of a pattern of intrusions on First Amendment rights by the Bush administration. "I'm ready to throw my arms up in the air," she said. "If there was a subpoena, they are supposed to be notified."

When a subpoena is used to obtain a journalist's telephone records, a Justice Department policy requires disclosure of that seizure to the journalist within 90 days. It isn't clear whether the Justice Department relied on subpoenas or whether it followed that policy.

One ambiguity the Justice Department may be exploiting is that the regulations, adopted in 1980, refer to trial and grand jury subpoenas. ABC suggested yesterday that its records may have been obtained without going through the courts, but instead by using authority for so-called national security letters contained in an anti-terrorism law passed in 2001, the Patriot Act.