Germany wants its intelligence services to move faster, gather better information and rely less on foreign partners. A new bill is under scrutiny at the Bundestag. Legal and administrative hurdles have sometimes held the services back. But giving them more power also creates a responsibility to make sure that power is properly controlled.
The proposed changes mainly affect the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, and the BfV, its domestic intelligence service. The military counterintelligence service, MAD, is affected more narrowly, particularly through changes to interception and supervision.
The biggest change is the move from collecting information towards actively interfering with threats. That can include disrupting systems, manipulating communications or providing misleading information. This brings the boundary between intelligence work and law enforcement into sharper focus. Both use covert methods, but their purposes and safeguards differ. Intelligence services assess threats and inform government; police investigate offences, gather evidence and exercise enforcement powers within criminal justice procedures.
Cooperation between them is necessary. The concern is whether intelligence services could increasingly perform functions close to policing while operating under different rules, with less visibility for the people affected. Germany’s history makes that an especially sensitive issue. Clear responsibilities, legal thresholds and limits on intervention become essential.
Oversight is therefore central to the whole reform. The draft reorganises supervision and expands the role of the Independent Control Council, known as UKRat. The issue is whether those arrangements will work effectively as the services gain new capabilities. Reviewers need access to operational information, technical expertise, enough staff and the authority to act when something goes wrong. Approving a general operating framework also leaves a separate question about how individual operations are checked.
Some methods mentioned in the bill deserve especially close scrutiny: recruiting teenagers, the BND’s proposed exceptions for recruiting parliamentarians or their staff, and providing false or altered threat-related information. Their operational usefulness does not settle whether the safeguards are strong enough. Permission to manipulate information during an operation also should not make fabricated material genuine evidence in court.
The comparisons with Spain and Britain provide useful perspective. Germany would gain a more explicit legal basis for several capabilities, but that alone does not establish that its services would enjoy greater freedom overall. The countries organise intelligence differently and use different combinations of authorisation, secrecy, oversight and legal remedies.
German experts are divided, too. Some oppose the reform’s overall direction. Others support modernisation while raising serious concerns about particular powers, the independence of oversight or the practical difficulty of implementing the law. Those positions should be presented fairly.
Finally, new powers will not produce better intelligence overnight. Training, investment, experience and coordination will matter just as much as legislation. The safeguards must also survive changes of government and protect lawful political activity. Citizens should be able to trust that powerful intelligence services remain accountable even when the people running them change.
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