[13 August 2026] For much of the postwar era, Germany maintained intelligence services deliberately constrained by law, institutional culture, and historical memory. There were compelling reasons for this restraint. Yet institutions fashioned to meet the dangers of one age cannot remain frozen while the character of the threat changes around them. Germany’s decision to substantially reform the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) is therefore not merely overdue. It represents a sober recognition that Europe has entered a markedly less forgiving security environment.
The German cabinet has approved legislation that would transform the BND from an organization principally concerned with collection and assessment into one capable, under specified circumstances, of actively disrupting hostile operations. The proposed authorities include penetrating adversary computer systems, deleting or manipulating data, disabling infrastructure used in hostile cyber campaigns, and undertaking other forms of technical disruption. German authorities would simultaneously gain broader capabilities for acquiring digital information, while an expanded independent oversight structure would seek to ensure that these powers remain compatible with constitutional government.
This is a consequential change. It is also a necessary one.
The intelligence service that merely observes an adversary preparing sabotage, cyberattack, assassination, or covert political interference—but possesses no lawful means of frustrating the operation—belongs to another era. Russia in particular has demonstrated the utility of operating in the shadowland between espionage and armed conflict: cyber operations, sabotage, disinformation, covert influence, proxies, surveillance of critical infrastructure and suspected plots against European targets. German officials now describe the threat from foreign hybrid operations as acute. Recent incidents involving drones and suspected sabotage have lent considerable urgency to that assessment.
Germany has also learned an uncomfortable lesson: excessive restrictions on one’s own intelligence capabilities eventually produce dependence upon the intelligence capabilities of others. German officials have acknowledged that threats have sometimes been detected because allied services possessed authorities that German agencies lacked. Berlin’s reforms are consequently about sovereignty as much as efficiency. A major European power cannot indefinitely subcontract essential elements of situational awareness to Washington, London, Paris, or anyone else.
There must, of course, be restraint. A democratic intelligence service must never become an unaccountable instrument of executive power. Germany’s historical sensitivity to domestic surveillance is not an impediment to be swept aside; it is a constitutional inheritance worth preserving. The proper answer is therefore neither impotence nor license, but capability married to law: intrusive authorities, precisely defined thresholds, judicial and parliamentary scrutiny, independent oversight, and meaningful consequences for abuse.
Other European governments should draw the broader lesson. Britain and France already possess formidable intelligence traditions, and the United Kingdom has recently strengthened its legal architecture against espionage, sabotage, cyber operations and foreign interference. Yet neither they nor Spain should assume that institutions developed during the Cold War and subsequently adapted for the counterterrorism era are necessarily configured for the contest now emerging. Europe requires services capable not merely of discovering hostile activity, but—within carefully constructed legal boundaries—of disrupting it.
The distinction matters. Intelligence in the twenty-first century increasingly occupies the territory between passive collection and military action. A hostile server can be rendered useless without an airstrike. A sabotage network can sometimes be disrupted without arrests. A foreign intelligence operation may be deceived rather than merely watched. These are precisely the graduated instruments democratic states require if they are to respond proportionately to adversaries who deliberately operate below the threshold of conventional war.
Germany deserves credit for recognizing this reality. One hopes that Paris, London, Madrid and other European capitals will undertake equally serious examinations of their own services—not necessarily in imitation of Berlin, but in response to the same strategic transformation. [EIA]