SPYING REQUESTS made by UK authorities have soared to over half a million a year, a report shows.

And it seems our local authorities can’t help themselves from keeping a nosey eye on us either.

Interception of Communications Commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy's latest report onto what police and local councils are up to was published yesterday.

His figures show that the requests for information in 2007 amount to more than 1,400 a day or over half a million in the year. In the previous two years the average amount of requests was 350,000 a year.

The report also shows that around 1,707 requests were made by local councils wishing to sniff through the telephone records and other information on people we assume were paying their council tax.

This follows the INQ’s report exactly a month ago where councils were criticised for snooping just to catch ordinary people out.

The type of information the local authorities can get their hands on are itemised phone bills and records of web site visits. If they also listen to our actual conversations, they're not telling us.

Kennedy said that he believes, “local authorities could make much more use of communications data as a powerful tool to investigate crime.” And maybe also catch out people who are slow in taking their wheely bins back in.

We're having a good snoop through the report to see what else they've been up to in our name. µ