LAW enforcement and government departments are accessing vast quantities of phone and internet usage data without warrants, prompting warnings from the Greens of a growing ''surveillance state'' and calls by privacy groups for tighter controls.

Figures released by the federal Attorney-General's Department show that federal and state government agencies accessed telecommunications data and internet logs more than 250,000 times during criminal and revenue investigations in 2010-11.

Scott Ludlam, Greens senator ... "We’ve already taken some pretty dangerous steps ... towards the surveillance state." Credit:Jim Rice

The Greens senator Scott Ludlam highlighted the statistics while calling for tighter controls on access to mobile device location information.

''There should be a higher standard of proof, or a higher standard of cause needing to be shown, to track down your every location through your life than there is for reading your email,'' he said at a recent conference on internet privacy.