The 2006 report What price privacy now? [PDF] was produced from the findings of Operation Motorman and listed suspected cases of the media having illegal access to private data. Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/newsteam.co.uk
The Information Commissioner's Office has confirmed it has passed to police the file of a 2006 investigation into the sale of private information to journalists.
The transfer of the Operation Motorman files, which documented the practices of private investigator Stephen Whittamore and associates, marks the widening of the inquiry into phone hacking to the broader issue of paying for access to confidential information.
The files were the basis for the 2006 information commissioner's report What price privacy now? [PDF], which identified 3,522 occasions where 305 journalists requested information the commission believed was likely to have been obtained illegally.
