Ministers are facing calls to curb the scale of police access to private phone and email records, after a report by privacy campaigners found officers were making a request every two minutes and getting access in 93% of cases.

The figures, released to Big Brother Watch under freedom of information laws, found there were more than 730,000 requests for communications data between 2012 and 2014 from forces across the UK. There were annual increases in applications in each of those years, peaking at just under 250,000 last year, according to the report.

It also uncovered a huge disparity in how many requests were being allowed by each force, with some, such as Essex, rejecting 28% of requests but others, such as Cheshire, turning down only 0.1%.

The report comes at a sensitive time for the government, which is sitting on an official report about surveillance powers by David Anderson QC, who has warned that it “won’t please everybody”.

Read the Full Article: Source – The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/01/police-request-access-phone-calls-emails-granted-every-two-minutes

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