Intelligence Observer Council to appear in Germany

Germany will monitor its own intelligence. A supervisory board is being created in the country to monitor the activities of the Federal Intelligence Service. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, this body, which will include four federal judges and two federal prosecutors, will appear in 2022.

Their job is to ensure that the Federal Intelligence Service acts in strict accordance with the law when wiretapping around the world. Previously, the secret service itself decided how to work. But recently the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled that this can no longer continue, tracking communication flows on the Internet without a specific reason is contrary to the Basic Law (Constitution) of the Federal Republic of Germany and it is necessary to protect the secrecy of telecommunications and freedom of the media. The court ordered lawmakers to review and restrict the powers of the special services by the end of 2021. And now the department of the Federal Chancellor has already prepared a 111-page draft of the corresponding law.

It is assumed that the newly created supervisory board will be able to see everything that the Federal Intelligence Service is doing around the world and check how legal it is. We are talking about both wiretapping entire telephone networks and monitoring specific suspects, including operations carried out at the request of the intelligence services of other countries. According to statistics, the intelligence service intercepts over 150 thousand messages and conversations every day, of which only a few hundred are of interest.