The creepy powers given to German spies

Germany's domestic intelligence service has much more wide-sweeping powers than those of other western spy services.

Photo by Isai Ramos on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

How far is a spy service allowed to go to protect the democracy it serves? When does its role tip from being one that protects the state’s citizens to one that sees citizens as threats?

This is a fundamental question for any functioning democracy. In a state with a restrained spy service, people don’t worry about what they say and where they say it. In a state with an unchained secret police, citizens are constantly looking over their shoulders.

The world is full of examples of the latter. 

On paper, the feared mukhabarat of the Arab world are there to protect people from Zionist infiltration; in reality, their role is to mercilessly quash any hint of opposition to the regime. East Germany was another paper democracy backed up by a powerful spy service, the Stasi, whose role was to root out and silence dissent.

On the other hand, a marker of liberal democracies is the strict limitations that are imposed on domestic intelligence services.

In the UK, MI5 is expressly forbidden from conducting any surveillance that could be seen as interfering in the democratic process. US law imposes similar restrictions on its spy services. Classically, the role of these agencies is to intercept foreign spies; more recently it has widened to include snooping on international terror networks.

Whether our spies always stick to these parameters is another matter. Suffice it to say, when Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ were hoovering up metadata on citizens’ phone calls (i.e., information about the call, but not its contents), it caused a major scandal.

Germany is a different story. 

I’d venture to say that the German domestic spy service has one of the oddest, and arguably most troubling, remits of any government agency in the Western world.

The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (literally federal office for the protection of the constitution) isn’t particularly good at preventing terrorism - Germany is mainly reliant on tip-offs from foreign spies to prevent terror attacks. 

But then, that’s not its central function.

By its own definition, the Verfassungsschutz sees its job in very general terms as “identifying attempts to undermine our peaceful constitutional order.”

What are “attempts to undermine our peaceful constitutional order,” I hear you ask? Isn’t this just another way of describing national security threats?

Not in the least. Anti-terror and counter-espionage are “secondary” assignments, the agency states on its website.

More important to the Verfassungsschutz is identifying Germans who could potentially be saying and doing things that undermine their fellow citizens’ faith in democracy.

If, like me, your reaction is to think that this is a ludicrously vague remit that is likely to lead to a gargantuan spy apparatus, you’re not wrong. Germany doesn’t just have a federal spy agency, all sixteen states have their own intelligence services, each equipped with powers to spy on citizens suspected of “undermining” the constitution.

While the federal agency has some 4,500 staff, Bavaria has the largest state service with close to 600 spooks.

In April, Verfassungsschutz boss Thomas Haldenwang set out exactly who should expect to feel the hot breath of an intelligence agent down their neck.

“Freedom of expression isn’t a licence to say what you want,” Haldenwang warned in an article published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His agency isn’t interested in whether what you say is legal or not, he made clear.

What matters more is whether you “express an effort” to undermine the state. Such statements could include ones that “are supposed to destabilize the pillars of our democracy” or statements that “could sow the seeds for violent activity,” Haldenwang continued.

In other words, anything that could be interpreted as threatening in the paranoid world of intelligence gathering is fair game.

Judging by what we’ve learned from German history, this all sounds like a great idea…

The results of this snooping are then published in an annual report in which the agency names and shames people and groups that are certified as extremist or ones that are merely suspected of being so.

Up until recently, such miscreants were sorted into the categories of Left-wing, Right-wing, and Islamist. Then, during the pandemic, a new category was introduced for people who “delegitimize the state.” Such people are dangerous because they “disparage democratic decision-making processes, or call for official or judicial orders and decisions to be ignored,” according to the agency.

The latest Verfassungsschutz report, published last week, states that they have found some 1,600 people who are actively “delegitimizing the state.” Presumably, all of them are under some sort of surveillance. Their crimes include “agitation against climate policies” and “debates about the political and economic fallout of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

In one of the strangest examples of this overweening apparatus, the Verfassungsschutz has even started to spy on its old boss, who they keep a 1,000-page file on in the category of right-wing extremism.

That file is still confidential, but the agency sent a letter to former spy boss Hans George Maaßen confirming that they were watching him, and giving some detail on why. Maaßen has since published the letter: his crimes include making speeches that were later shared on social media by other people who the spy service is watching.

Maaßen is himself a true son of his profession: his public utterances since being pushed into early retirement due to a disagreement over refugee policies in 2018 reveal a man who sees conspiracies around every corner. According to the letter sent by the spy service, he has said publicly that Olaf Scholz wants to destroy Germany via mass migration, and he fears that the Greens might one day put people into “re-education camps” for not riding bikes.

These are opinions. They are not very subtle opinions. But then, who said that only people with nuanced views on the world should be allowed to speak without fear that a man in a trench coat is going to start following them around town?

Maaßen, who recently set up a political party that he hopes to challenge the CDU with, claimed that the decision to spy on him was political. As he well knows, the Verfassungsschutz takes direct orders from the interior ministry.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that there has been a whiff of political persecution about the agency's activities. For decades, it spied on lawmakers from the left-wing Die Linke party, including the current state leader of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow.

With the German middle classes currently involved in a fevered Kampf gegen Rechts (battle against the Right), none of this is remotely controversial.

After Maaßen revealed that the Verfassungsschutz was watching him, the head of the Bundestag’s intelligence oversight committee - i.e., the man responsible for keeping the agency in check - welcomed the news and suggested that Maaßen’s state pension should be cut as punishment for his “disloyalty.”

Meanwhile, journalists see the spy service as a sort of public health agency reporting on cancers within the body politic.

In February, the Association of German Journalists reminded its members that it is their responsibility to treat the Verfassungsschutz’ conclusions as objective fact.

“If the Verfassungsschutz classifies a movement as extremist, the media have an obligation to continuously refer to the movement's extremism like a warning on a packet of cigarettes,” the association said.

That might also explain why German journalism is often so anodyne. Perhaps even the media are scared of saying anything that could be interpreted as “delegitimising the state.”

Which reminds me, I meant to work on toning down that headline a little bit…

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