German lawmakers vote to expand spy agency powers for covert operations

BERLIN — Germany’s parliament on Friday approved a major overhaul of the country’s intelligence agencies, giving German spies new powers to conduct covert operations such as sabotage abroad and launch cyberattacks against adversaries.

“Germany serves as an operational theater for terrorism, extremism and foreign powers,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, who helped craft the reforms, told lawmakers.

The country’s intelligence agencies have generally been limited mostly to gathering and analyzing information, a legacy in part from Germany’s dark historical experience with the Nazi Gestapo and East German Stasi secret police.

But security officials and German leaders have argued that a more robust and powerful BND foreign spy agency is essential to respond to mounting threats facing the country from hostile foreign actors.

Russia looms largest, with BND spy chief Martin Jaeger warning that Moscow has been waging a “shadow war” against Germany using drones, espionage, sabotage, disinformation and other tools.

The expanded powers approved by lawmakers Friday will give the BND authority to potentially retaliate with sabotage operations and cyberattacks of its own, and also significantly expand the agency’s ability to intercept and retain data.

Targeted assassinations remain strictly forbidden, however.

The domestic Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV, spy agency, which is largely tasked with monitoring extremist groups and homegrown threats, will also see its powers expanded under the reforms.

Dobrindt boasted that the BfV — which until now has mostly gathered information and issued reports — will now become “a genuine secret service.”

But the agency’s operational role within Germany will remain much more limited than the BND’s scope abroad.

Civil liberties groups and other critics have warned that the reforms could erode privacy protections and sweep up the private data of innocent citizens in a form of mass surveillance.

The expanded role of the domestic BfV agency has been met with particular controversy, with opposition lawmakers from both the far right and far left fearing it could become a “secret police.”

Defenders of the reforms, however, have contended that robust oversight of the powers remains in place and that intelligence agencies in other European democracies already possess similar or greater powers.