ASHINGTON, Nov. 18 — A special federal appeals court ruled today that the Justice Department has broad new powers under the antiterrorism bill enacted last year to use wiretaps obtained for intelligence operations to prosecute terrorists.

The immediate effect of the ruling by the three-member panel is that criminal prosecutors may now take an active role in deciding how to use wiretaps authorized by a special intelligence court and should have greater access to information obtained from them. For more than 20 years, prosecutors have been prohibited from making decisions on which intelligence wiretaps to apply for because the standards of proof are widely believed to be lower than for regular criminal wiretaps.

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But the judges today said that the passage of the legislation, the USA Patriot Act, ensured that there is no wall between officials from the intelligence and criminal arms of the Justice Department. In fact, the judges asserted that the 20-year-old practice of keeping the two largely separate was never required and was never intended by Congress.

"Effective counterintelligence, as we have learned, requires the wholehearted cooperation of all the government's personnel who can be brought to the task," the panel wrote. "A standard which punishes such cooperation could well be thought dangerous to national security." [Excerpts, Page A19.]

Today's unanimous ruling was a significant victory for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who announced immediately that he would use it to greatly expand the use of the special intelligence court by prosecutors to obtain wiretaps of people suspected of involvement with terrorists.

"This is a giant step forward," Mr. Ashcroft said at the Justice Department, adding that he would swiftly increase the number of lawyers both at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in prosecutors' offices around the country to seek authorization for new wiretaps and surveillance orders to combat terrorism.

"This revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts," he said.

The ruling also adds momentum to the Bush administration's determination to shake off restrictions on how investigators have operated since the Sept. 11 attacks, including the lifting of restrictions on investigators using the Internet to compile databases for combating terrorists. It may also oblige the F.B.I. to share information gathered by its counterintelligence agents more readily.

Both the appeals court and the court whose opinion it overturned today were created solely to administer a 1978 law allowing the government to conduct intelligence wiretaps inside the United States. The three-member appeals court, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, in issuing its first opinion ever, said that the lower court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, had erred when it tried to impose restrictions on the Justice Department.

The Court of Review, which had never met before and essentially existed on paper, is made up of Judges Ralph B. Guy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; Edward Leavy of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; and Laurence H. Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. All were appointed to the panel by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist of the Supreme Court.

Because of the unusual nature of the law on which the case was decided it is unclear whether anybody is in a position to appeal today's ruling to the Supreme Court. The only party was the Justice Department, which won; the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who filed briefs, were afforded only friend-of-the-court status, which does not entitle them to appeal.

Ann Beeson, a litigation director at the civil liberties union, said her group was exploring whether to seek to be allowed to intervene as a party.

The case arose in May when the lower court, which decides whether to grant intelligence authorizations, ruled on an application submitted by Mr. Ashcroft's investigators. At the time, the court ordered the government to meet certain conditions to obtain the authorization to wiretap an individual who is identified in court papers only as a resident of the United States who is working as an agent of a foreign power.

The three members of the lower court ordered the Justice Department to show that the primary purpose of the application was for intelligence gathering and not a criminal case. Moreover, the court ordered that prosecutors in the Justice Department's Criminal Division could not take an active role in directing the activities of the intelligence division.

The notion of a separation arose in the 1980's and was put into department regulations in 1995. The reason was that the requirements for obtaining a wiretap for intelligence gathering were thought to be easier to meet than those for a straightforward criminal investigation. As a result, investigators were instructed not to try to avoid the stricter standards for a criminal investigation by pretending it was for intelligence.

Although the world of national security wiretaps has always been conducted out of public view, Mr. Ashcroft's challenge of the lower court ruling exposed the debate in the government over the balance between civil liberties and national security that heated up after Sept. 11.

In an unsigned opinion, the appeals court unanimously ruled that Mr. Ashcroft was correct in saying that the USA Patriot Act swept away the distinctions between the intelligence and criminal sides of the national security operations. Even more striking in the court's ruling was the strong assertion that the restriction that had been observed for two decades was never required.

The appeals court noted that the lower court had said there was a "wall" between the investigative and intelligence sides. But the judges today said that there is not and never was supposed to be a wall between the two and that the Justice Department contributed to this mistake by writing it into its regulations.

The appeals court was harsh in its language directed at the lower court for trying to retain a wall between intelligence officials and prosecutors. The panel said that the judges on the FISA court, as the lower court is known, were improperly trying to tell the Justice Department how to run its operations and that that was a violation of the Constitution's separation of powers between equal branches of government.

The lower court ruling was written by Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who was until recently the chief judge of the FISA court. Judge Lamberth had complained angrily that Justice Department officials had frequently misled the court by claiming they were seeking wiretap authorization for intelligence gathering but had been deceptive in that they were trying to obtain a wiretap for a criminal investigation.

The appeals court also asserted that the requirements for obtaining wiretap authorization under the intelligence law were not that different in a constitutional sense from the requirements for obtaining a warrant in a criminal case, challenging a widely held assumption. Applications for criminal warrants must comply with the Fourth Amendment's proscriptions against intrusive searches and require an official declaration that there is "probable cause" to believe the subject is involved in a crime. By contrast, the intelligence surveillance law requires only a showing that there is probable cause that the subject is the agent of a foreign power.