Germany steps up domestic surveillance: the foreign spy service gets to work at home

On 12 August 2026 the German cabinet approved a package of more than 700 pages that rewrites what the country's intelligence services are allowed to do. The chancellery calls it the most far reaching reform of the services since they were created. The foreign intelligence service gets room to work inside Germany, both services get artificial intelligence for mass data analysis and the right to act against threats rather than only report them, and the bodies that supervise them are rebuilt at the same time. The Bundestag still has to pass it.

What the services gain

The package was presented by interior minister Alexander Dobrindt. It widens collection and storage of data, allows automated analysis of large volumes, and lets the services move from watching a threat to interfering with it: disrupting sabotage, striking back at cyber operations. The BND, the foreign intelligence service, would be able to operate against targets inside the country, which in Germany is not a technical detail.

Some of the sharpest powers are not spelled out in the text of the law. The civil rights organisation Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte notes that only the explanatory memorandum makes clear that state trojans and remote searches of devices are included. A former ministerial director at the justice ministry, Peter Schantz, points at another one: internet wide biometric matching, an authority broad enough to be served by commercial face search tools of the Clearview kind.

What oversight loses

The gap in the middle is the part that is hard to explain away. The data protection commissioner stops supervising the services in January 2027, and the new council will not accept complaints from citizens until 2029. The first public report on how the new powers are used is due in 2031 and will cover the years 2028 to 2030. Exemptions from freedom of information rules expand across every federal agency that receives intelligence data.

Why the fight is about history as much as technology

Germany keeps its police and its intelligence services apart on purpose. The rule dates from the post war order and exists because a state where one body both collects secrets and makes arrests has been tried here before. That is why a domestic role for the foreign service draws the reaction it does: in parliament the criticism ranged from the liberal FDP calling it historically problematic to the Left party invoking the Gestapo directly, while the Greens said there would be no blank cheque.

The technical objections point the same way. Statements filed on the draft argue the threshold for surveillance is set too low, to the point where sticking posters or tearing them down could justify serious measures, and that an agency allowed to trigger operations automatically, with artificial intelligence deciding when, is a different animal from one that files reports.

When encryption itself becomes a signal

One line in the submissions deserves to be read twice. Under the proposed criteria, the ordinary hygiene of a journalist or a lawyer, encrypting a hard drive, encrypting mail, could itself count towards suspicion. That inverts the logic of privacy tools: a VPN, disk encryption or a secure messenger are what a careful person uses precisely because everyone should, and a law that reads care as a red flag ends up aimed at the people with the most to protect, not the least.

There is a second order effect too. A service allowed to exploit software vulnerabilities has a reason to keep them unreported, and an unreported hole is open for everyone else as well, including the attackers the same service is supposed to stop.

What happens next

The cabinet decision is the start of the parliamentary road, not the end of it. The package goes to the Bundestag, where the coalition's own partners have already promised conditions, and it will collect constitutional challenges the moment it takes effect: Germany's supreme court has struck down intelligence powers before, including surveillance of foreigners abroad. What is worth watching is not the rhetoric about threats, which everyone agrees on, but the two quiet numbers above, 2027 and 2029, and whether anyone closes the gap between them.