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On Friday, November 13, 2026, Germany's parliament did something it has not done since the Federal Republic was founded: it gave its intelligence services the legal right not merely to watch a threat, but to strike at it. The Bundestag voted 309 to 190, with 71 abstentions, to pass a sweeping overhaul of the country's intelligence laws. The foreign service, the BND, may now run covert operations abroad — including sabotage. The domestic service, the BfV, may act against threats at home for the first time in its history. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, who championed the bill, called it the "reform of the century."
Here is how the new law works, what each agency can now do, and why Germany decided it could no longer afford to be a country whose spies only take notes.
What changed, agency by agency
The reform covers Germany's two intelligence services, and it changes each of them in a different way. The BND, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, is the foreign intelligence service. Under the new law it gains authority for covert operations abroad, including sabotage. According to reporting on the legislation, the range of possible actions includes paralysing the servers of state-backed hacking groups, disrupting disinformation networks, and interfering with weapons supply chains. Where the BND once gathered information about a hostile network and passed it to someone else, it may now act against that network itself.
The BfV, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is the domestic service — and its change is arguably the bigger one. Until now it was limited to collecting information. Under the new law, its agents may take protective action against property and IT systems when a specific threat is identified: disabling explosives or weapons, blocking or diverting data flows during a cyberattack, and deleting or falsifying data held for malicious purposes. Both agencies gain wider surveillance powers, including monitoring encrypted communications and online searches, and a legal basis to use artificial intelligence to analyse large datasets and to match faces biometrically against images found online. Under defined conditions, agents may also covertly enter private homes and business premises to prepare surveillance operations — but only with prior approval.
There are limits, and they are explicit. The law rules out any measure intended to endanger a person's life or physical safety, and targeted assassinations remain strictly forbidden. The BND may keep intercepted content for six months and metadata for up to a year, according to reporting on the bill's provisions. The point, as the government presents it, is to give the services the tools of a modern intelligence agency while keeping them inside a legal framework — a framework that, until now, did not exist.
Why now: hybrid warfare, drones and a court deadline
The government's case rests on a single phrase that Dobrindt repeated in the debate: "We are the target of hybrid threats." He added that "Germany is a theatre of operations for terrorism, extremism and foreign powers." Hybrid threats are the mix of espionage, sabotage, cyber activity and other pressure that falls short of open war — and Germany says it is facing them daily.
The incidents behind the claim are concrete. In August 2026, a drone carrying an explosive device was found at Leipzig Airport, close to Ukrainian cargo planes; German authorities say Russia was behind it. Germany is also probing a second power-grid sabotage case, and Reuters has reported growing fears of hybrid warfare as investigators hunt those behind the attacks on the grid. The reform's supporters point to these cases as proof that a service limited to watching and reporting cannot keep up with adversaries who act.
There is also a legal deadline behind the timing. The reform process began in the cabinet in August, when ministers approved a draft running to more than 700 pages, and it was driven, according to reporting on the bill, by a deadline set by Germany's own highest court: on October 8, 2024, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the BND's strategic surveillance needed a new legal basis. The new law is, in part, the answer to that ruling — a rewrite of the rules under which German intelligence operates, rather than a mere expansion of them.
What the critics say
The vote itself shows the divide. The governing CDU/CSU and SPD carried the bill; the AfD and Die Linke voted against it, and the Greens abstained, according to reports of the vote. Critics hear in the new powers an echo of Germany's own history — a country whose experience with the Stasi and the Gestapo is the reason its post-war intelligence services were built to watch rather than act. The power to enter homes covertly, to monitor encrypted communications, and to use AI and biometric matching on material found online is, for those critics, a Rubicon crossed: the kind of capability that is easy to grant and hard to take back.
The government's answer is that the powers are bounded — by prior approval, by the ban on endangering life, and by the requirement that action be tied to a specific, identified threat. Whether those bounds hold in practice is now the question that will decide whether the "reform of the century" is remembered as a necessary modernisation or as an overcorrection. Germany has spent eighty years building intelligence services that observe. From this week, they are allowed to intervene. The rest of Europe — and Russia, China and Iran, the three countries Dobrindt named as sources of the threat — will be watching what they do with that permission.
For more on the great-power politics behind this shift, see why Trump, Xi and Putin are meeting — and why nothing is expected, and why the Black Sea became the world's deadliest shipping route.