German Intelligence Handcuffed
May 20, 2020
DarkCyber noted an interesting news story published on DW.com. The article? “German Intelligence Can’t Spy on Foreigners Outside Germany.” The DarkCyber research team talked about this and formed a collective response: “What the heck?”
The write up reports as actual factual news:
The German government must come up with a new law regulating its secret services, after the country’s highest court ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens at will violates constitutionally-enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications.
The article continued:
The ruling said that non-Germans were also protected by Germany’s constitutional rights, and that the current law lacked special protection for the work of lawyers and journalists. This applied both to the collection and processing of data as well as passing on that data to other intelligence agencies.
This is an interesting development if it is indeed accurate. Some countries’ intelligence agencies do conduct activities outside of their home countries’ borders. Furthermore, there are specialized service and device vendors headquartered in Germany which facilitate extra border data collection, monitoring, tracking, and sense making. These range from Siemens to software and hacking companies.
Restricting the activities of an intelligence unit to a particular geographic “space” sounds like a difficult task. There are “need to know” operations which may not be disclosed to an elected body except under quite specific circumstances. Electronic monitoring and intercepting ranges freely in the datasphere. Telecommunications hardware and service providers like T-Mobile have a number connections with certain German government entities.
Plus DarkCyber surmises that there are current operations underway in certain parts of the world which operate in a way that is hostile to the German state, its citizens, and its commercial enterprises.
Will these operations be stopped? Turning off a covert operation is not like flicking a button on a remote control to kill a Netflix program.
What if the German intelligence community, known to be one of the best in the European Community, goes dark?
The related question is, “What if secret agencies operate in secret?” Who will know? Who will talk? Who will prosecute? Who decides what’s important to protect citizens?
Stephen E Arnold, May 20, 2020
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