Berlin’s plan to empower intelligence services comes as European leaders grow increasingly concerned that U.S. President Donald Trump could move to halt American intelligence sharing with Europe.
To keep German spies in check, the country’s privacy regulator started a legal challenge against the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) after it refused to share details of how it hacked electronic devices of foreigners abroad and gathered data.
On Thursday, an administrative court ruled the privacy regulator didn’t have legal standing to pursue the case, redirecting it to file a complaint with Germany’s chancellery instead.
The ruling means “areas free from oversight will emerge” within German spy agencies, Specht-Riemenschneider said, calling the agencies’ data processing practices “secretive.”
Germany’s BND has historically been far more legally constrained than intelligence agencies elsewhere, due to intentional protections put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy and security services Gestapo and SS. The agency was put under the oversight of the chancellery and bound to a strict parliamentary control mechanism.
Germany’s stringent data protection laws — which are also largely a reaction to the legacy of the East German secret police, or Stasi — restrict the BND further. The agency must, for instance, redact personal information in documents before passing them on to other intelligence services, POLITICO reported.