The German government has approved a draft law aimed at lifting many of the restraints on its spy agencies imposed during the postwar period as the country reels from two attacks in a month that have exposed serious security gaps.
The controversial changes, which must still pass parliament, largely comply with a wishlist pulled together by the foreign and domestic intelligence services, which have long complained Germany lags behind its allies and enemies.
“We are turning our intelligence services into genuine secret services,” the interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, told Bild newspaper, which called it a security “revolution” and “historic”.
He said: “It is high time we positioned ourselves to be competitive and on an equal footing with our partner services around the world. This requires operational capabilities and active powers to tackle modern state terrorism and extremist groups more effectively.”
A deadly car ramming in late July at Berlin’s huge annual Pride parade by a German-born Islamist known to the authorities was followed by the discovery last week of a drone laden with explosives near a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport, a key defence transport hub.
Friedrich Merz’s unpopular centre-right, centre-left coalition government is under pressure to demonstrate it can modernise to keep its citizens safe, while preserving rights and principles laid out in Germany’s Basic Law.
The intelligence services reform plans have been in the offing for months and were repeatedly fine-tuned before being presented to the cabinet on Wednesday.
The federal foreign intelligence service (BND), which turned 70 this year and is run by a former ambassador to Ukraine, Martin Jäger, will gain new powers to confront emerging threats from state actors such as Russia and China with fewer impediments, and with the help of AI.
German authorities say the threat level has soared since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as agents linked to Moscow have allegedly carried out repeated sabotage, spying and hacker attacks against critical infrastructure and military equipment manufacturers.
Jäger said Germany must be able to show adversaries “that we’re in a position to do similar things so the other side also feels the pain”.
The BND has until now overwhelmingly had a defensive position, making it largely a repository for information with few operational powers.
According to the draft law’s more than 700-page text, German spies will have permission to manipulate or delete data known as “hack-back” cyber-attacks.
Other options include, altering instructions on how to build weapons or rendering arms harmless during production.
Digital payments to low-level “disposable” agents, employed on a one-off basis by foreign governments, could be blocked to thwart attacks.
The use of force by intelligence personnel abroad will remain forbidden – keeping it far out of the league of the CIA, the Mossad in Israel or the DGSE in France. But agents will be able to carry weapons for self-defence more often without explicit permission.
The law, which the government hopes will be in place by 1 January 2027, would loosen rules around data protection, widely mocked as exaggerated and self-defeating.
The BND and the domestic security watchdog, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), will be unshackled to collect, store and analyse more information for longer with the help of AI. It will also be easier to gain permission for online searches and home surveillance against criminal suspects.
Germany will also beef up oversight of the BND and the BfV by an independent board, in addition to powers already granted to parliament’s intelligence control committee.
Although reforms were widely seen as necessary and overdue, some politicians warned of overreach.
The federal commissioner for data protection, Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, said her office would be stripped of oversight powers over the BND and criticised the expanded access to CCTV footage in public spaces in Germany and abroad.
Konstantin von Notz, the opposition Green party’s spokesperson on intelligence oversight, called the changes “urgently needed” and said he backed “stronger powers” for the BND. But he said the draft law “overshoots the mark”.
He was particularly critical of the powers granted to the BfV, which he said were “difficult to reconcile” with the principle of separation between the powers of the intelligence services and the police – a lesson drawn from the darkest chapters of German history.
The legislation could face court challenges mounted by its critics.
Faced with rising geopolitical uncertainty and doubts about the role of the US as guarantor of the country’s security, Germany is also in a major rearmament drive. Merz took office last year pledging to turn Germany’s armed forces, or Bundeswehr, into “Europe’s strongest conventional army”.
