Germany shrugs off Stasi concerns as it expands spy agency powers

German MPs have backed a plan to beef up the country’s domestic and foreign intelligence services, shrugging off ghosts of the past to tackle growing security risks in the present.

Friday’s vote ended a seven-decade run for Germany’s domestic and foreign intelligence services – known respectively as BfV and BND – as the so-called “vegetarians of the spy world”.

Unlike their red meat rivals like MI6, CIA and Mossad, German agencies focused mainly on intelligence-gathering analysis, with far fewer active competences – and certainly no licence to kill.

This caution was a direct response to abuses of intelligence agencies in Germany’s two 20th century dictatorships. From 1933 to 1945 the Gestapo secret police tortured and even killed political rivals of the Nazis.

The East German equivalent, the Stasi, operated a repressive regime from 1950 to 1990.

As a result, modern German intelligence officers were forbidden from carrying out any activities analogous to police activity – in particular, detention of persons or searching of homes.

That all changes with the new rulebook. At home, BfV agents will have greater powers to search citizens’ computers, phones and other networks. In addition, they can order telecommunications companies to collect particular data, though only with permission from an oversight control committee.

Abroad, BND agents will in future have greater powers to intervene in concrete risk scenarios, such as to destroy weapons or substitute components in explosives destined for Germany.

Perhaps the biggest area of change is in IT and cybersecurity. After years of so-called hybrid attacks on German public and private IT systems, with many reportedly linked to Russia, the BND and BfV will now be allowed to hack back to “halt data flows that are a source of danger”.

The intelligence reform comes hand in hand with new rules to boost critical infrastructure, months after attacks on electricity infrastructure in Berlin and on Ukrainian planes at Leipzig airport.

Opposition parties have given a mixed response to the reforms, which also cover the military intelligence service. Green politician Konstantin von Notz, who sits on Germany’s federal intelligence oversight committee, said it was clear that reform was overdue. “Silo thinking in individual agencies has led to huge security issues,” he said.

But he criticised a push to hand the BfV agency at home equivalent competences to the BND abroad. “I find it dangerous and crude to hand it competences that for good reason are limited to the police, like infiltrating IT systems and modifying information,” he said.

Opposition criticism of the reforms grows in volume and intensity the further from the political middle ground.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is both Germany’s most popular political party and a key domestic intelligence target. Its politicians fear the reforms will hand government ministers greater powers to tackle a main political rival. In advance of Friday’s Bundestag vote, federal interior minister Alexander Dobrindt called the reform a timely response to Europe’s growing “shadow war”.

He dismissed as “crazy” opposition claims that he was creating successors to Germany’s previous secret police institutions.

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“The Stasi and Gestapo had no controls, while we have the strongest controls our services have ever had,” he said. “We want to bring our services to the same level as our European partners.”

German professional organisations, from lawyers to psychotherapists, have expressed concerns that the reforms will impinge on the confidentiality of their client relationships.

Similarly, German media organisations say it remains unclear what the reforms means in practice for journalists protecting their sources, particularly in organised crime circles.

“Things are still open and our concerns have not been addressed,” said Helmut Verdenhalven of German publishers’ association BDZV.