The German Cabinet is set to approve expanded powers for the country’s intelligence agencies in the face of evidence of low-level hybrid attacks, including the option of actively intervening in clearly defined cases.<\/p>\n
The Cabinet is due to approve a draft law at its Wednesday meeting that will, for example, allow the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) to manipulate the IT infrastructure of a foreign power during an ongoing cyberattack or disinformation campaign.<\/p>\n
The law also provides for greater oversight and new safeguards, including a limit on monitoring an organization as a suspected extremist group to a maximum of five years. An extension would require Interior Ministry approval.<\/p>\n
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party has been monitored by the domestic intelligence service as a suspected extremist organization since February 2021, and in May last year, the party’s classification at the federal level was upgraded to “confirmed far-right extremist.” This is under review by the courts.<\/p>\n
The draft law was published in early July. Reforms address issues such as comparing biometric data with information from the internet and the power to conduct online searches – a covert measure in which access is gained to a device to search the data stored on it.<\/p>\n
The reform has been planned for some time, but the threat from spying and sabotage – particularly from Russia – is believed to have increased, while the number of politically motivated crimes is also rising.<\/p>\n
The Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that oversight of surveillance must be made more effective, finding a lack of rules for separating out data from purely domestic telecommunications and that protection of the core area of private life for foreign individuals abroad was inadequate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The German Cabinet is set to approve expanded powers for the country’s intelligence agencies in the face of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[52408,5,52409,7691,4626,32166],"class_list":["post-70465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-federal-intelligence-service","tag-germany","tag-intel-agencies","tag-intelligence-agencies","tag-interior-ministry","tag-police-officers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}