Has Germany's Security Revolution Gone Too Far?

On August 12, Germany’s cabinet approved the most extensive overhaul of the country’s federal intelligence laws in its history. The proposed reforms would give Germany’s intelligence agencies broader surveillance powers and, more importantly, allow them to directly disrupt certain threats rather than simply collect information them. The government argues that this shift is necessary, as Germany faces more espionage, sabotage, cyberattacks and other forms of hybrid warfare. But the reforms risk conflating two questions that should not be treated as the same: how much power should Germany grant to an intelligence service operating abroad, and how much to one operating inside the country?

This distinction is crucial because two very different German agencies are at the center of the proposed reforms. The Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND , is the country’s foreign intelligence service. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV , is its domestic intelligence service, tasked with monitoring extremist, terrorist, and other threats to Germany’s constitutional order. Both would gain new capabilities under the proposed new legislation, but the risks of expanding their powers are not identical.

Germany has historically placed tighter limits on its intelligence and surveillance agencies than many of its European allies. Germany’s postwar intelligence system was deliberately constrained in response to the Nazi regime and its secret police force, the Gestapo . The later experience of East Germany’s state intelligence agency, the Stasi, reinforced the country’s deep sensitivity to domestic surveillance. Modern Germany, therefore, developed a security structure intended to keep intelligence gathering under tight legal and political control. In 2020, the Federal Constitutional Court reinforced that approach when it ruled that the BND remained bound by Germany’s fundamental rights protections even while surveilling foreigners abroad. The court found that the existing framework lacked sufficient limits and independent oversight.

The problem for Berlin is that the security environment has changed faster than some of its rules. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 accelerated a broader reassessment of German defence and security policy. Against that backdrop, German officials have repeatedly warned Russian espionage, sabotage, and cyber operations. Iran has also been cited as a major source of foreign intelligence activity. The government argues that Germany has become too dependent on information and capabilities supplied by allies and needs to be able to respond to threats on its own.

The law proposed in August is designed to do just that. It would expand access to digital systems and create clearer rules for the use of artificial intelligence in intelligence analysis. As part of its strategic intelligence gathering, the BND could retain collected telecommunications content for up to six months and metadata for up to 12 months. Under the current system, traffic data is generally limited to six months. The new proposal would also allow collected material to be stored without prior review, giving the BND a larger pool of past communications to when a new threat emerges.

The more significant change is the introduction of what the government calls “active measures.” Instead of only identifying a threat and passing information to another authority, the BND could sometimes act directly under specified legal conditions. The government has given examples of what this could include, such as deleting stolen victim data found while investigating hacker networks, disabling servers used by state-backed hackers, and entering computer systems connected to drone factories or chemical-weapons facilities to disrupt production. These powers would move the BND closer to the more operational role played by intelligence agencies in allied countries such as France, Britain, and the United States.

The case for expanding BND powers is relatively easy to make. A foreign intelligence service facing cyberattacks, hostile state operations, and sabotage cannot always afford to identify a threat and then wait for another agency to respond. Germany also has a clear interest in reducing its dependence on foreign intelligence partners. The expansion of BfV powers, however, is much more complicated. Unlike the BND, it operates primarily within Germany. The drafted legislation would allow the domestic service to take active measures under narrower conditions than the BND, including when foreign intelligence activity threatens particularly serious damage or when a threat risks causing significant unrest across large parts of the population. The government says these measures would be limited to objects, rather than people, and could only be used when another authority could not achieve the same result.

Those limits matter, but so does the direction of travel. Germany’s intelligence system has traditionally tried to preserve a separation between gathering intelligence and exercising police-like powers. Expanding the BfV’s ability to monitor a threat and act against it narrows that distinction. That, however, does not mean the BfV should remain frozen in the past. Germany faces domestic terrorism, extremism, and foreign espionage, all of which have increased in threat alongside new technologies. But powers exercised against threats abroad do not automatically carry the same risks as powers exercised inside a democracy—against people and organizations living under its laws.

France offers a useful example of how a democracy can expand intelligence powers in response to serious security threats while still facing pressure to preserve legal limits and privacy protections. In the months following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, France adopted a major intelligence law that expanded the surveillance techniques available to its intelligence agencies. The law allowed the use of tools, including location tracking, microphones, keyloggers, and forms of telecommunications monitoring. France’s data-protection authority pushed for tighter limits during the legislative process, and the Constitutional Council struck down several provisions that it found lacked sufficient safeguards, including an emergency procedure that could bypass normal prior authorization. The French experience did not show that stronger intelligence powers inevitably destroy privacy. Rather, it demonstrated that as intelligence agencies gain more intrusive capabilities, independent oversight and clearly defined legal limits become more important.

Germany’s proposal attempts to address that problem, particularly by expanding independent and parliamentary oversight, but it does not fully resolve the concern raised by extending more operational powers to the BfV. The Independent Oversight Council would gain broader authority and would review particularly intrusive surveillance and active measures, while parliamentary oversight would remain in place. The government also argues that the new law responds to Constitutional Court rulings by creating clearer thresholds for different types of surveillance.

Oversight can limit the risks of expanded intelligence powers, but it cannot erase the fundamental difference between the BND and the BfV. Germany does need an intelligence system capable of responding to interference, and many of the restrictions surrounding its intelligence services were indeed written for a different security environment. But they were not simply bureaucratic leftovers. They were deliberate democratic safeguards created because Germany understood the dangers of allowing security institutions to accumulate too much power.

The question then is not whether Germany should modernize its intelligence system, but rather how far that modernization should go, and whether the same logic should apply equally to agencies operating abroad and at . Strengthening the BND may be a necessary response to a more dangerous Europe, while expanding the BfV’s operational role deserves greater caution. Germany’s security revolution will ultimately be judged not only by whether its intelligence agencies become more capable, but by whether the limits surrounding them remain strong enough.

Edited by Ella Schrebler

Featured Image: The Reichstag building in Berlin at sunset, of the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament. Photo by Ansgar Koreng is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE .