The ascent of Howard has given new authority to phone-in radio, his preferred medium for reaching ordinary Australians.
He also said commercial authorities like phone companies, even though government-owned, should not be involved in checking the contents of private messages.
In October 2008, Swedish authorities intercepted phone calls between Ali Yasin Ahmed and Mr. Yusuf, in which the men discussed their plans to travel to Somalia to join Al Shabab and die as martyrs, according to the documents.
Word of both police actions came during ongoing controversy about the so-called Prism program under which United States authorities tapped phone and Internet companies for surveillance of communications from non-Americans.
The F.C.C. has shied away from asserting that voice and data moving on wireless networks are the same thing, which would allow it to apply its greater authority over phones to broadband access services.
But aides to the governor could not say yesterday whether the bill he is proposing would cover what has become Exhibit A in the annals of lobbying state authorities: a phone call that Alfonse M. D'Amato, the former United States senator and mentor of Mr. Pataki, made in 1999 on behalf of a client to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which the governor controls.
Helicopter gunships flying overhead, the authorities severed phone and road links, and locals responded by building barricades and calling the government's actions an invasion.
In Bologna authorities were phoning up to 12,000 elderly residents individually to offer advice.
His successor as chair, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who recently shepherded a bill through the committee that would entrench and expand NSA's authority over bulk phone data, backed Rockefeller.
In contrast, Senator Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican on the Judiciary Committee, is proposing legislation to give the administration authority to tap phone calls or e-mail with parties outside the country that involved a known member of a designated terrorist group on at least one end.
