At a time when Germany is a constant target of hybrid attacks, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Council of Ministers has today approved a bill to reform the country’s intelligence services so that in the future they can intervene actively and counterattack, and not just limit themselves to collecting and analyzing information as they have done until now. The opposition has harshly criticized these plans for fear that the strict separation between espionage and the police is at risk, recalling the country’s history.
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“We are transforming our intelligence services to turn them into genuine secret services,” said German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt during the presentation of the new Intelligence Services Act, which regulates both the Federal Intelligence Service abroad (BND) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), as domestic espionage is known. “A new era for intelligence services begins now,” he pointed out.
The conservative politician defended this reform by warning of the “serious threat situation” Germany faces. “We are a daily target of hybrid warfare, espionage, sabotage, cyberattacks, and covert actions by foreign powers aimed at Germany, with the goal of destabilizing our country, causing harm, and provoking political and social changes,” he said. In his view, this law is the “response” to this threat situation, for which it is necessary to have intelligence services with “effective capabilities” and that are competitive.
For the first time since the creation of these services, they will not only have to collect information and alert to threats, but will have operational and active competencies against possible attacks and adversaries, a competence that until now was reserved, in principle, for the police. Specifically, these services will be allowed to sabotage an adversary in an emergency, for example, in the supply of weapons.
The BND will also be able to respond to cyberattacks by paralyzing the technical systems from which they are launched. It will be able to divert and interrupt data traffic, eliminate malicious software, or provide false information to an attacker. If, for example, it had knowledge of a drone factory in Russia and suspected that these drones were going to be used against Germany, it could neutralize them through technical measures. “We have to show that we are capable of doing very similar things, so that the other side also feels pain,” Martin Jäger, president of the BND, had explained earlier.
Meanwhile, in the case of the BfV, it will also be able to infiltrate attackers’ computer systems, paralyze them, and carry out counterattacks, as well as sabotage terrorists’ weapons and explosives. Likewise, they will be able to search homes in situations of special danger, as well as spy on computers and networks more easily than before. The comparison of biometric data with Internet data and the power to carry out online searches are also regulated, and artificial intelligence will be used to improve the analysis of all obtained data, which can also be stored for longer: a period of six months for content data and up to 12 months for metadata. And under certain conditions, BfV employees will be able to access private homes, for example, to manipulate electronic devices.
Russian threat
The approval of the reform, on which the government has been working for months, comes in the context of the thwarted drone attack at Leipzig airport. It is not yet clear if Russia is behind the attack, but clues point to Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging an increasingly aggressive hybrid war. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has increasingly expanded its covert war in Europe, from cyberattacks to fake news campaigns and acts of sabotage, also in Germany. It also takes place a few weeks after the attack on the Pride march in Berlin, in which a Polish woman lost her life and 29 people were injured. The attack reopened the debate on how to strengthen the monitoring of dangerous Islamists.
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The new head of the Chancellery, Nina Warken, also considers it urgent to act. “Our country and our democracy are threatened to an extent that until recently we could not even imagine. Germany is now a constant target of hybrid attacks by foreign powers, and that poses a real and very serious danger,” she warned and recalled that until now Germany has relied on its partners to also guarantee its security and depends “too much” on it. “Our goal is, and must be, to strengthen our intelligence services so that their capabilities are no longer behind those of other European partners,” she explained in the joint appearance with Dobrindt. With this modernization, “the BND will have more access possibilities to computer systems, from smart appliances — such as, for example, a refrigerator — to private mobile phones, laptops, or other types of hardware,” she detailed.
The control of these actions will be concentrated in the Independent Control Council (UKR), as the highest federal authority. The Council, which has existed since 2021, will now be responsible for both prior control of intensive surveillance actions and continuous control of data protection. “Instead of the previous distribution among different control bodies, we now guarantee firm and gapless control from a single instance,” Warken pointed out.
However, this new bill has been harshly criticized by the opposition. The Greens warn that these services would not be sufficiently controlled and consider that the strict separation between intelligence services and the police is at risk. “With this reform, Dobrindt tries to blur that separation,” said the Greens’ interior expert, Konstantin von Notz, on German public television ARD. “In the future, agents will also be able to act against citizens, without this being done transparently and subject to judicial control, as happens with the police.”
For his part, the leader of the Liberal party (FDP), Wolfgang Kubicki, accused Dobrindt of a “historic breaking of a taboo” and recalled that there are historical reasons for a “strict separation between secret services and the police,” he told the newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine. “I want full judicial control in cases of fundamental rights violations and a state that understands that freedom is not defended by cutting it back.”
The principle of separation is considered a lesson learned from Nazism. At that time, the so-called State Secret Police (Gestapo), endowed with broad powers, acted brutally against the Nazis’ political opponents, as well as against Jews and other groups. “Whoever grants intelligence services operational intervention rights, sabotage powers, and state hackbacks is planning a new German secret police,” declared Left Party deputy Clara Bünger, who called this reform “alien to history and irresponsible.” The far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) — which is partly being investigated by intelligence services as suspected of right-wing extremism — also completely rejects these plans.
