Germany's Intelligence Service Reform

Overdue and essential to respond to Russia's hybrid aggression

my interview yesterday with TVP World

1️⃣ With the sweeping reform bill adopted by the German government and passed to the Bundestag yesterday, Germany takes a momentous step to modernise the mission brief for its intelligence agencies.
2️⃣ The Bundesnachrichtendienst (Foreign intelligence) and the Verfassungsschutz (counterintelligence and homeland security) will go beyond the gathering and analysis of intelligence: they will now be able to collect and save data more assertively and take action to respond to, and even pre-empt, hybrid warfare (as demonstrated dramatically by the very probably Russian drone attack against Leipzig airport).
3️⃣ This is an essential part of the Zeitenwende, Germany’s tidal change in beefing up security. The fact that it comes so late is due to lessons from Germany’s Nazi past when there was no separation of powers and intelligence and police were one and the same: the Gestapo. But leaving German agencies with their post-WW2 limitations has actually contributed to their current state of unpreparedness. And of course, the more powerful services will continue to be tightly controlled by democratic institutions.
4️⃣ Liberals criticise that “you can’t defend freedom by curtailing it.” - but without this reform, we risk losing freedom altogether. And the “de-escalation fetishists” on the extreme Left and Right complain that this will only “provoke Russia”. After what Russia is demonstrating every day in Ukraine and in its intensifying sabotage & disinfo campaign against us, that’s a moot point. Appeasement only makes Putin more aggressive.
🎯 This reform is overdue, and it will pass with the government’s majority in autumn.