Yeltsin Broadens Authority of Successor Agency to KGB : Russia: He reportedly signs act allowing warrantless searches, other new powers. Rights activists are concerned.

President Boris N. Yeltsin has broadened the powers of the successor agency of the KGB to allow searches without warrants, legalize electronic surveillance and revive gathering of foreign intelligence, it was disclosed Thursday.

Yeltsin’s move, which brings into law another sweeping revision of the Communist-era spy agency, was branded by human rights activists and democratic reformers as an effort to bring the hated KGB to life again.

In a terse dispatch released in the middle of the night, the independent Interfax news agency reported without elaboration that Yeltsin had signed the Federal Security Services Act on Monday.

Because Yeltsin had proposed the measure to expand the investigative powers of the Federal Counterintelligence Agency, his signature came as no surprise.

But the legislation had been approved by the Russian Parliament in late February, and the delay in presidential endorsement had stirred some expectations that its scope might be narrowed.

Rampant corruption and soaring crime are paramount concerns for most Russians struggling through the country’s chaotic economic transition. Those fears allowed and encouraged the increasingly conservative Parliament to pass the presidential proposal to strengthen the state’s hand.

But democratic activists and former dissidents who suffered at the hands of the KGB say they fear the easing of restrictions on the security agency is more an attempt to reassert control over the population than to effectively combat crime.

“The law on the activity of the Russian security service, in fact, validates and legalizes a whole array of human rights violations and infringements, which gives the security forces an opportunity to intervene in citizens’ private lives, carry out surveillance, tap phones and inspect personal correspondence,” said Viktor V. Pokhmelkin, deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee on judicial and legal reform and a member of the pro-democracy Russia’s Choice party.

In a more developed democracy, the changes might not prove menacing, the lawmaker said.

“But we are living in a country that is a far cry from a democratic republic, and this law can easily be interpreted by the security service as an OK to begin tightening the screws, if not to unleash mass repressions,” he said.

Sergei A. Kovalev, the presidential human rights adviser who is increasingly alienated from Yeltsin, deemed the security measure “a revival of the old KGB.”

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Phone-tapping and other intrusions into the privacy of Russian citizens have remained common practice despite earlier efforts to curb abuses by the intelligence agency, Kovalev said.

The revision allowing warrantless searches has been the most controversial aspect of the new security law, as it authorizes agents “to make their way into living and other premises without hindrance” when they suspect criminal activity is being conducted there. Agents raiding private residences will be required only to report the intrusions to judicial authorities within 24 hours after they occur.

With the law approved by Yeltsin, the agency--to be known in the future as the Federal Security Service, or by its Russian acronym, FSB--resumes responsibility for gathering foreign intelligence, a function stripped from the agency during two other restructuring efforts over the last three years.

Supporters of the broadened security powers insisted that the changes are necessary to ensure security and order in a society rapidly descending into lawlessness.

“There are many democratic laws, but they are not tailored to the Russian reality,” Sergei V. Stepashin, director of the security service, said in an interview published Wednesday in the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.