The Annex: a flat, a control council and three months of frozen data

The Annex reads the paper behind the headline. This week’s paper is an amendment by the CDU/CSU and SPD parliamentary groups to the planned reform of Germany’s intelligence-services law, first reported by Politico and summarised by AFP¹. The headline is that spies may enter homes. The document is more specific than that, and the specifics are what you would want to know.

Clause one: the flat. The Bundesnachrichtendienst, the foreign intelligence service, may enter homes secretly, including inside Germany, in order to prepare or carry out intelligence measures¹. Special hurdles apply to homes in Germany and to homes of German citizens abroad¹. The BND must order the entry explicitly, and the measure must be checked in advance by the Unabhängiger Kontrollrat, the Independent Control Council¹. That is the first thing to read in any such law: who signs, and who checks before rather than after.

Clause two: the networks. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the domestic service, may examine structures of organised crime when there are concrete indications that actors it already observes are being supported by them¹. The coalition’s stated reason is that state and extremist actors use so-called “low-level agents” and “crime-as-a-service” offers¹. The trigger is “concrete indications”, not suspicion in general. Watch whether that phrase survives.

Clause three: the freeze. Both services may instruct telecoms providers to store existing traffic data temporarily when there are concrete signs it may become relevant, even though the legal conditions for storing it are not yet fully met¹. The services may not access the frozen data automatically; they need a separate request afterwards¹. For the BND, the freeze may in principle last no more than three months¹. This is a quick-freeze design: preserve first, justify access later, and only within a time limit.

What the minister said around it. Interior minister Alexander Dobrindt went further at a party event in Thuringia at the end of the week, saying the reform would give the legal basis to disrupt and even destroy attackers’ servers and software, including abroad, and adding that “this week it was cooling systems in supermarkets”². The Bundestag takes up the reform this coming week². Speeches describe ambitions; the amendment describes procedures. The procedures are what courts will test.

For you. You do not need to have a view on intelligence services to read a law well. Ask three questions of every new power: who orders it, who checks it before it happens, and when it expires. This amendment answers all three for at least some of its clauses¹. The answers are not glamorous. They are the point.