The German Cabinet has approved 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 approved a draft law on Wednesday 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
This expansion of powers will be accompanied by tighter scrutiny of the intelligence services’ work, including a limit on monitoring an organization as a suspected extremist group to a maximum of five years, according to the plans. An extension will 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 intelligence services and their respective supervisory authorities – the Federal Interior Ministry and the Federal Chancellery – point out that the new powers represent a major change. At the same time, however, they emphasize that, from a legal perspective, the reform merely brings Germany up to the level of other European services in certain areas.<\/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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The German Cabinet has approved expanded powers for the country’s intelligence agencies in the face of evidence of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[52408,5,52409,7691],"class_list":["post-71022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-federal-intelligence-service","tag-germany","tag-intel-agencies","tag-intelligence-agencies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71022","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=71022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}