Have you really checked the numbers?
Erm, that's 700k requests in 3 years, not 2 (Jan 2012 to Dec 2014).
And that's across 50 police forces plus cross force bodies.
And do you know how this actually works? Police analysis leads to a reasonable suspicion of a group drug dealing or other criminal activity (a lot more often than terrorism), so they make a request for itemised phone records for each of the people involved (time of call, duration, target number called), backing up this request by the information they've gathered so far as justification (cf getting a warrant to search a property).
Drug dealers and organised criminals usually have quite a few mobile phones, plus landlines, plus mobiles for their partners etc. You grab records for all of these to see what other numbers they call, and then you can see who else might in their gang, where they might get their supplies from, where the money goes, what other mobile sthey might have that you don;t know about yet etc. And for numbers they call a lot, you then request the call record for those numbers - a bit of call pattern analysis and with luck you're starting to get a wider picture of the people you're investigating, and the timing (who calls who when, etc).
So a single relatively investigation may easily involve requests for 10 or 20 phones, with a similar number following on. Add in more calls for when a month later you want to grab fresh data for the people involved to see if it still matches before you actually pounce and arrest people, and maybe a few records that turn out to be false leads, and it's not unreasonable to see what is notionally a single investigation pulling in 100+ records (it was different when they analysed paper bills by hand, but now it's easy to import these into network analysis tools).
Suddenly 700k requests in 3 years starts to sound not so many...this is not casting a net far and wide, but does 3,000 active investigations per year sound that unreasonable in a country of 60 million people?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
