Intel reform

Germany reforms its main intelligence service

Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, has passed a comprehensive reform of the country's main intelligence service, the BND. The new legislation strengthens government monitoring of intelligence activities while explicitly allowing the BND to carry out certain types of surveillance activities. 

The reform comes in the wake of the 2013 revelations by American whistleblower Edward Snowden that a number of national intelligence services, including the BND, had spied on behalf of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and that the NSA had spied on its allies. That prompted the formation of a German parliamentary committee to draft intelligence agency reforms.

The new legislation subjects the BND to monitoring by an "independent panel" of two judges and a federal prosecutor and a "permanent commissioner" from the Interior Ministry. It stipulates that surveillance of international communications networks must be authorized by the Chancellor's Office rather than by the BND itself and explicitly prohibits economic and industrial espionage.