Mayor Defends Spying by Police Before G.O.P. Convention - New York Times: "'We had a fundamental responsibility to learn whether groups might include any potential terrorists or anarchists planning to cause or take advantage of any disruptions,' Mr. Bloomberg told reporters at a news conference. Toward that end, he said, the Police Department monitored those who said they intended vandalism or disruptions and, he added, 'in a few instances, we did keep track of groups or individuals who did plan to come to New York for the R.N.C. convention and who might have been planning violent acts.'

The administration has come under sharp criticism for its tactics with protesters before and during the convention, which included denying permission to rally in much of Central Park, sending undercover officers to infiltrate protests, making mass arrests of demonstrators and detaining many of them for days at a Hudson River pier.

But the scope of the preconvention operations, in which officers traveled widely, is just emerging from records in federal lawsuits brought as a result of the mass arrests as well as from still secret reports reviewed by The New York Times.

In defending the program, Mr. Bloomberg said that everything had been in accordance with court guidelines and was aimed at protecting the city and showing its recovery at a time when the presence of President Bush and members of Congress made it an even more inviting terror target.

'We were not keeping track of political activities,' he said. 'We have no interest in doing that.'

But the records show that the police did covertly monitor political activity. Virtually every intelligence report, even those about expressly peaceful groups, described the political viewpoints of the organizations."