Telstra says that police and spy agencies very rarely have a warrant when they request customers’ information.

Telstra has put out its first annual Transparency Report, saying that in tens of thousands of Government requests for customer records, only 3.9 per cent were approved by a court order or warrant.

Government security agencies and police forces accessed 84,949 Telstra customer records in the 2014 financial year, of these, just 598 were in response to court orders and 2,701 were based on warrants for the interception of data.

“Between 1 July 2013 and 30 June 2014, we received and acted on 84,949 requests for customer information,” the report said.

“2,701 were warrants for interception or access to stored communications.”

“Outside of Australia, we received less than 100 requests across all the countries that we operate in.”

It adds to Telstra’s recent revelation that law-enforcement agencies have also been accessing Australians' complete web browsing histories without warrants.

Telstra says that the vast majority, 75,448, of records were carriage service records, customer information or “pre-warrant checks” to see if a customer is still using their phone.

Many government agencies access customer information with a “lawful request”, separate to a warrant or court order.

Security bodies like the Australian Federal Police and ASIO employ the technique, as do groups such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and local councils.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam leads the charge toward reasonable surveillance and data retention laws, while other politicians seem to advocate a “take everything” approach.

Senator Ludlam told Fairfax Media this week that he was concerned about the seemingly rampant access of records, and the rise in the number of warrantless requests by 10 to 20 per cent each year.

“It's a huge escalation of warrantless access to people's records and you'd have to expect that if the data retention regime was brought forward that the number would continue to skyrocket,” he said.

“It appears these agencies can conduct their business and have done for years and years without a data retention policy and without access to new categories of metadata that didn't exist ten years ago,” Senator Ludlam said.

“Even if the data retention proposal was taken off the table ... we've got a very big problem with the warrantless accessing of extremely invasive material including location records.”