This includes lists of telephone numbers dialled and email addresses to which messages have been sent, but not their content.
A total of 552,550 such requests were made last year, an increase of five per cent on the previous year and 10 per cent up on the 504,073 requests made in 2008.
The majority of request came from police and security services but 134 local authorities made 1,809 requests between them.
That was up on the 1,756 requests from 131 councils the year before.
When in power, Labour promised to act to curb the use of RIPA powers by local authorities amid concerns they were being used for trivial matters rather than serious crime.
Under Coalition proposals currently going through Parliament, all RIPA requests for local councils will have to be sanctioned by a magistrate.
Dominic Raab, the Tory MP, said: ?This disturbing data demonstrates the importance of the coalition's Freedom Bill ? to reverse the legacy of Labour's surveillance society.?
Sir Paul, who reviews requests under the Act, also found that among the half a million requests there were more than 1,700 errors, resulting in incorrect numbers or emails being monitored.
Some 1,061 of these came from the Security Service and were blamed on two technical glitches.
One meant a series of targeted phone numbers all had their last three digits replaced with ?000? while the other meant some requests were not approved by someone of sufficient rank.
A further 640 errors were made by other bodies but Sir Paul insisted the error rate remain very low and made up less than one per cent of requests.
Last November, the information watchdog warned Britain is heading towards becoming a surveillance state of unmanned spy drones, GPS tracking of employees and profiling through social networking sites.
The relentless march of surveillance has seen snooping techniques "intensify and expand" at such a pace that regulators are struggling to keep up, Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner said.
Despite moves by the Government to curb invasions of privacy, a new wave of monitoring risks making the spy state more intrusive than ever.
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