POLAND holds a dubious honour: the central European giant is Europe's leader in cell phone surveillance. In 2011, Polish authorities made 1,856,888 requests for information from billing records—who called who when, for how long, etc. That was nearly half a million more than in 2010.

In Poland nine different bodies, from the police to tax inspectors, are allowed to access cell-phone information, and usually on simple presentation of a written request. Many European Union (EU) member states regulate this kind of surveillance far more strictly. In Greece, for example, it can only be used after a court has decided all other means of investigating a given crime have been exhausted. This EU Commission report has full details.

A case that Poland's constitutional court is about to consider could result in a historic decision. The court has brought together five complaints—two from the Prosecutor-General and three from the Civil Rights Ombudsman—regarding surveillance. The prosecutor has drawn particular attention to the vast range of offences for which surveillance is allowed, by no means all of them criminal, let alone prisonable. Moreover, authorities are not limited to looking at the billing records of persons actually under suspicion. Anyone in contact with them can be targeted too. A further worry is that there is nothing to prevent information being turned over to less democratic countries with which Poland has agreements, and used for prosecuting political opponents (in Belarus, for example), or even adulterers.

The Panoptykon Foundation, an NGO that defends digital freedoms and the right to privacy, is also fighting plans to require (as many countries already do) those purchasing pay-as-you-go SIM cards to provide ID. Police say the overwhelming majority of criminals use such prepaid SIM cards. Campaigners counter that they would easily find ways around registration.

There is however evidence to support the swift tracking of mobile phone records. According to Mariusz Sokolowski, a police spokesman, one famous example is the theft of the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from Auschwitz in 2009. Without the help of information on the thieves' mobile usage, he claims, the symbolic sign might never have been recovered.

Yet in a country that so prides itself on its successful transition from communism to freedom, the growth of the surveillance culture is viewed with concern. Campaigners are hoping that the court will consider much of it incompatible with articles 49 and 31 of the Polish Constitution.

The Panoptykon Foundation gained a certain prominence earlier this year during Poland's massive protests against the now-defunct Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Most of the tens of thousands of Poles who protested against ACTA were fighting to preserve their file-sharing lifestyles (ACTA's botched attempt to regulate this whilst preserving intellectual property rights means the problem remains unresolved, but that is a separate issue). Panoptykon succeeded in bringing its concerns over the treaty's implications for privacy onto the radar too.

Katarzyna Szymielewicz, co-founder of Panoptykon, is a little disappointed that the movement against ACTA did not grow into a broader popular campaign against surveillance. But she says it did inspire more individuals to become activists, and made the Polish media take more interest in digital freedoms. Panoptykon has been campaigning for greater controls over surveillance in Poland for two and a half years. It is not directly responsible for bringing the matter before the Constitutional Court, but can certainly take credit for stimulating the debate.