THE defeat of government plans to introduce a “snooper’s charter” last week appears to be a career disaster for Charles Blandford Farr OBE, until now Whitehall’s smoothest securocrat.
Farr has enjoyed an extraordinary rise since he was a lowly MI6 officer wandering central Asia offering taxpayers’ money to opium growers in the hope of persuading them to abandon the drug trade.
Labour home secretary John Reid brought him in from the shadows in 2007 to head counter-terrorism. Farr responded to the promotion with a plan to build a giant database where the government could hold details of all emails and telephone calls.
A blank cheque to spyIn opposition David Cameron’s Tories were against giving the security services a blank cheque to spy on everyone without a warrant. But when Dave arrived in Downing Street and Theresa May pitched up at the Home Office, their defence of a citizen’s right to privacy vanished. They agreed to a new “Farr-more” proposal to allow the security services, police and possibly dozens of other state agencies to monitor everyone’s emails, Skype calls, contacts on social media and conversations in chat rooms, along with details of which websites they visit and computer games they play.
Farr’s success may be down to the fact that he couldn’t look less like a sinister spook. To add to his reassuring manner, he speaks in a constipated form of bureaucratese that sends listeners into a catatonic trance. The Home Office disguised his plan to hack every computer and mobile phone in Britain with the dull name of the “Interception Modernisation Programme” under Labour, and changed it to the equally soporific “Communications Capabilities Development Programme” under the coalition. So successfully did Farr navigate Britain’s regime change in 2010, he even persuaded Fiona Cunningham, Theresa May’s special adviser, to become his girlfriend.
Ferocious maulingA background in spookdom, however, is not the best preparation for public scrutiny – and the coalition had to yank back its communications data bill after a ferocious mauling from a joint committee of MPs and peers.
The Home Office had failed to consult the computer service providers who would have to insert thousands of black box probes into the country’s computer and phone networks, it said. Simon Milner from Facebook told the committee the Home Office had contacted his social media site only after it published its bill, and even then it had had just “one phone conversation with them about it”.
Farr and May wanted to future-proof their bill by giving the home secretary the power to spy on any new forms of communication that come along without democratic approval. What with Britain being a parliamentary democracy and all, MPs and peers were in no mood to let them do as they pleased. “We do not think that parliament should grant powers that are required only on the precautionary principle,” they said. “There should be a current and pressing need for them.”
‘Fanciful and misleading’Peers and MPs also suspected Farr was throwing public money around. The Home Office may have under-estimated “the cost of security [stopping all your private data leaking],” they said. And given Whitehall’s disastrous record in implementing IT projects, there was “a reasonable fear that this legislation will cost considerably more than the current estimates”. As for the figure for the estimated benefits that blanket spying would bring, it was “fanciful and misleading”.
After such harsh words one might have expected Farr’s career to suffer. But he still has the support of Theresa May and the affection of her special adviser. Civil servants whisper that May could yet promote him to be the Home Office’s next permanent secretary. But Farr may go, well, farther still.
