Germany’s data privacy authority on Thursday warned it can’t properly protect citizens from surveillance by the country’s intelligence services, right as Germany is moving to fortify its intelligence agency with sweeping new powers.
“Citizens have virtually no means of defending themselves against intelligence measures that can deeply intrude on their privacy,” Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, the head of the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI), warned after a court ruled against the commissioner’s request to get data on espionage activities.
Germany is drafting laws to give its intelligence services vast new powers, in a historic shift that breaks with decades of strict limits on its espionage abilities, rooted in the country’s Nazi and Cold War past.
Berlin’s plan to empower intelligence services comes as European leaders grow increasingly concerned that U.S. President Donald Trump could move to halt American intelligence sharing with Europe.
To keep German spies in check, the country’s privacy regulator started a legal challenge against the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) after it refused to share details of how it hacked electronic devices of foreigners abroad and gathered data.
On Thursday, an administrative court ruled the privacy regulator didn’t have legal standing to pursue the case, redirecting it to file a complaint with Germany’s chancellery instead.
The ruling means “areas free from oversight will emerge” within German spy agencies, Specht-Riemenschneider said, calling the agencies’ data processing practices “secretive.”
Germany’s BND has historically been far more legally constrained than intelligence agencies elsewhere, due to intentional protections put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy and security services Gestapo and SS. The agency was put under the oversight of the chancellery and bound to a strict parliamentary control mechanism.
Germany’s stringent data protection laws — which are also largely a reaction to the legacy of the East German secret police, or Stasi — restrict the BND further. The agency must, for instance, redact personal information in documents before passing them on to other intelligence services, POLITICO reported.
The German government is now reviewing those constraints and preparing an overhaul of intelligence powers. Chancellor Friedrich Merz wants to boost and unfetter his country’s foreign intelligence service, giving it much broader authority to perpetrate acts of sabotage, conduct offensive cyber operations and more aggressively carry out espionage.
Specht-Riemenschneider called on legislators to amend intelligence laws to make sure her authority can challenge agencies’ data processing, because the spy agency “can now effectively decide for itself what I am allowed to inspect and what I can therefore monitor,” she said.
Spy services across Europe have also started to build a shared intelligence operation to counter Russian aggression. The push for deeper intelligence cooperation accelerated sharply after the Trump administration abruptly halted the sharing of battlefield intelligence with Kyiv last March.
The BND did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ]]>