Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s cabinet approved a draft law on 12 August that rewrites what Germany’s spies are allowed to do, and the shift is fundamental. The new German intelligence law would give the foreign service, the BND, and the domestic Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the BfV, the power not merely to watch threats but to act against them, with new tools for surveillance, artificial intelligence and even sabotage. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt called it a revolution in the country’s security architecture. Here is what the law actually does.
From watching to acting
The central change is a change of mission. Since the 1950s, the BND and BfV have been built to gather and analyse information, not to intervene. The draft breaks that limit. Where a specific threat exists, and subject to an order reviewed by an independent oversight body, the BND would gain the task of proactively disrupting threats through what the legislation calls active measures.
The threshold matters as much as the tools. The draft does not licence free-roaming sabotage; it ties active measures to a specific, identified threat and to a documented order. The government casts this as the crucial safeguard, the difference between a service that reacts to a known danger and one that simply prowls. Critics reply that “a specific threat” is an elastic phrase, and that the real test will be how narrowly, or how loosely, the agencies and their overseers choose to read it.
Those measures are far-reaching. According to the cabinet’s own description, they include targeted penetration of the IT systems of chemical-weapons laboratories or drone factories in order to sabotage production, and shutting down or disabling servers run by state-sponsored hacker groups or disinformation actors. The Bill also lets agencies target supply chains, corrupting the components of a device before it ever reaches an adversary, and, according to reporting on the draft, even planting explosives in the IT systems of hostile drone plants or chemical facilities. In plain terms, German intelligence would be permitted to break into, and break, the machinery of a hostile operation rather than merely warn about it.
Two agencies, new reach
The reform covers both services, though it lands differently on each. The BND operates abroad and gains the widest new latitude for offensive cyber and disruption work. The BfV works at home on counter-intelligence and extremism, and it too would receive broader authority to access digital communications, collect data and mount active operations. The draft brings the domestic service under a single, uniform legal system where a patchwork of rules stood before.
That patchwork is a product of history. The two services were split precisely so that no single agency would hold both foreign and domestic power, a firewall between spying abroad and policing at home that postwar Germany treated as sacrosanct. The new law does not merge them, but by handing both broadly similar active-measures powers it thins the wall that kept them apart, which is exactly what unsettles the reform’s critics.
Running through both is artificial intelligence. The law provides for AI-based analysis of the vast data the agencies gather, along with wider data-sharing between them, a capability the government says is essential to keeping pace with adversaries who already use it. “We are transforming our intelligence services into genuine secret services,” Dobrindt told reporters in Berlin, saying that for the first time the agencies would be handed real operational powers. He described the package, drawn up over months, as nothing less than “a revolution” in the history of German national security.
Who watches the watchers
Because the powers are large, the oversight question is central, and the government’s answer is consolidation. The draft centralises legal supervision under the Independent Control Council, an external body that already oversees the BND’s signals intelligence, and creates more detailed legal bases for cyber investigations. Every active measure would require an order the council must be able to review, a judge, in effect, standing between the spy and the target.
Supporters argue this is tighter control, not looser, replacing scattered rules with one reviewable system. Critics counter that concentrating authorisation in a single body, however independent, is thin protection against powers this expansive, and that a council reviewing an order after the fact is not the same as a court approving it in advance. The tension between speed and scrutiny runs through the whole design.
The Independent Control Council is not a household name, and that is part of the concern. It is a specialist body of judges and staff rather than a courtroom open to public view, and its rulings on secret operations will themselves be secret. Supporters call that a necessary discretion. Sceptics call it oversight the public can never actually see, and therefore can never fully trust.
The civil-liberties fight
Opposition has landed hardest on the domestic side. Konstantin von Notz of the Greens said he supported expanded powers for the foreign-facing BND, given the range of threats Germany faces, but that granting the domestic BfV comparable authority was, in his words, “a cause for concern in terms of the rule of law.” Civil-liberties groups warn that broader data-collection powers at home edge toward mass surveillance, in a country whose citizens are unusually protective of personal data. A domestic service that can reach into devices, homes and offices, sift bulk data with AI and mount active operations is a powerful instrument to place inside a democracy, and Germany’s own twentieth-century history is the reason its citizens flinch at precisely that combination.
The government’s case is that the danger is real and present. Nina Warken, who heads Merz’s Chancellery and is responsible for the agencies, said Germany faces “a real, very acute” danger from hybrid attacks by foreign powers. The Bill’s defenders frame the debate as a choice between constitutional caution and the practical ability to stop an attack before it happens, rather than describe it after.
What happens next
Cabinet approval is a beginning, not an end. The draft now goes to the Bundestag, where Merz’s CDU/CSU-SPD grand coalition holds a majority but where the Greens, the Left and outside legal challenges can shape the final text. Germany’s courts have pruned back earlier, less ambitious intelligence reforms in the name of privacy and proportionality, and any law this sweeping is likely to be tested at the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. The politics are delicate. Merz’s Christian Democrats and their Social Democrat partners broadly back the reform, but the SPD has its own civil-liberties wing, and the Greens and the Left will fight the domestic provisions clause by clause. For now, the government has set the ceiling of its ambition. Parliament, and then the judges, will decide how much of it survives contact with Germany’s constitution.
