Operation Motorman was an investigation begun in 2002 that included raids on the offices of private investigators including those of Steve Whittamore, who kept records detailing customers of 'blagging' services and their requirements.
"Investigations by the ICO and the police have uncovered evidence of a widespread and organised undercover market in confidential personal information," said the ICO in its 2006 report What Price Privacy Now? (32-page / 392KB PDF). "Evidence included records of information supplied to 305 named journalists working for a range of newspapers."
The ICO has confirmed that it responded to a request from the Met and passed it all the evidence it had gathered as part of Operation Motorman in March of this year.
"The Motorman files were handed over to the Metropolitan Police three months ago," a spokeswoman said. "What was handed over was all of the information, all of the files, all of the evidence gathered in relation to the case."
The ICO spokeswoman said that this was the second time Operation Motorman information had been handed to police.
They gave the Met files in 2003 which led to successful prosecutions against a retired policeman and a civilian police worker, as well as Whittamore and a colleague, for trading information from the police computer in 2005.
The spokeswoman did not say whether all its files were handed over in 2003 or whether the March collection of files contains information that the police were not given in 2003, saying that the ICO cannot comment on these specifics because there is an ongoing police investigation.
"We handed over relevant files when asked," she said.
When the ICO looked at the files of Whittamore, an investigator who operated a network of contacts skilled in accessing private information, they found that almost every newspaper group had used his services.
The Daily Mail had used Whittamore more than any other paper, with the Sunday People and the Daily Mirror the next most frequent users, it said. The News of the World, which closed this month amidst a phone-hacking scandal, was also a heavy user.
Paul Dacre is the editor of the Daily Mail and the chairman of the committee which sets the Press Complaints Commission's Editors' Code of Practice. He told a Parliamentary committee looking into defamation law reform last week that he never "countanenced" blagging or phone hacking. He told the committee that his paper had never published a story which he knew to be based on material obtained unlawfully.
