Germany’s spies will be allowed to hack back and secretly enter homes, and the Left says the country is building a new secret police

Germany’s intelligence agencies are about to get the power to do more than watch. The Bundestag on Friday passed a sweeping reform that lets the BND, which spies abroad, and the BfV, which guards against threats at home, step in to disrupt the attacks they uncover.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt called it a “reform of the century”, saying Germany needs stronger services against terrorism and hostile foreign operations and that the changes put its agencies on an equal footing with their European partners. The vote was 308 to 190, with 71 abstentions.

What can the spies now do?

Until now, German intelligence could find a threat but often had to hand it to someone else to stop it, even when no other agency was responsible or able to act. The new law closes that gap. The BfV can take technical action against serious threats, such as deleting stolen data from an attacker’s server. The BND can act against threats abroad, including disrupting servers used by state-backed hackers.

Both agencies can respond to cyberattacks with “hack-backs”, and automated systems will be allowed to delete or manipulate data to fend off an attack without a human checking first. The BND will be allowed to secretly enter homes in Germany, and German citizens’ properties abroad, to prepare or carry out operations such as installing spyware, subject to prior review by the Independent Oversight Council except in urgent cases.

The law also opens real-time access to public video surveillance and mass biometric matching against publicly available images.

Why now?

Russia. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Germany has blamed Moscow for a run of sabotage, cyberattacks and drone incursions. In August, an explosive-laden drone was found near a cargo plane belonging to Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines at Leipzig-Halle airport; Berlin linked it to Moscow, and Dobrindt said it was consistent with Russian technology. Russia denied involvement. The two countries have also closed each other’s consulates, in Bonn and St Petersburg.

Florian Bigge, a programme director at the Körber-Stiftung think tank, named Russia as the main trigger for the reform, alongside concern about how unpredictable the United States has become.

What do the critics say?

That Germany is erasing a lesson of its own history. After the Nazi era, the country separated intelligence work from police work, and its constitutional court has upheld the agencies’ wide surveillance powers on the condition that they do not get police powers to prevent threats. The new law crosses that line.

The Left party warned it would effectively create a secret police, evoking East Germany’s Stasi; Dobrindt rejected the comparison. A civil society alliance led by the Humanistische Union made a last-minute appeal against the bill. Press freedom groups object that protection for journalists is sharply limited, and a new offence of up to five years in prison for recording agency sites or staff in ways that knowingly endanger security has only a narrow exception for the media.

Does it matter beyond Germany?

Germany is Europe’s largest economy and a central partner in NATO and the European Union’s response to Russia. What its services can now do, from hacking back against state-backed attackers to disrupting operations abroad, makes it a more active player in the shadow conflict that Australia and other allies have also accused Russia and China of waging through cyberattacks and interference.