Wichita ? Law enforcement authorities nationwide are intercepting more and more cellphone calls, text messages and other communications, with federal judges in Kansas and Missouri authorizing more than twice as many wiretaps in 2010 than the previous year, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said.

The office’s annual wiretap report, which was made public Thursday, shows requests to federal and state courts for wiretaps increased by 34 percent nationwide last year compared to the previous year. State and federal judges received 3,194 applications for wiretaps, denying just one of them. They authorized 1,207 applications by federal authorities. Judges in 25 states authorized 1,947 wiretaps.

The report showed wiretap applications in California, New York and New Jersey accounted for 68 percent of wiretaps approved by state judges. Most of the wiretaps — about 96 percent of them — were for so-called portable devices such as cellular telephones and digital pagers.

In Kansas, federal judges issued 25 wiretaps to intercept cellphone calls and text messages last year, up from 12 in 2009. Nearly all were related to illegal drug investigations. At least eight wiretaps were also authorized by state judges in Sedgwick and Shawnee counties.

In Missouri, the report says federal judges approved 46 wiretaps in 2010, up from 18 the previous year.

The federal wiretap with the most intercepts was located in the Southern District of California, where a cellphone wiretap in a narcotics investigation intercepted 74,715 messages over 210 days. The second highest number of intercepts occurred in the Western District of Missouri, where a cellphone wiretap in a drug investigation was active for 118 days and netted 74,144 interceptions.

Federal wiretaps cost an average of $63,566, according to the report. The cost of state-issued wiretaps varied greatly from a low of $68 in New Jersey to $1.69 million for a murder investigation in Massachusetts. Most of the applications for wiretaps, about 84 percent of them, listed illegal drugs as the most serious offense under investigation.

Authorities credited the wiretaps for 4,711 arrests and 800 convictions last year.

The report also noted that its figures do not reflect wiretaps regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.