A few days ago, I alerted readers to another proposed security reform in Germany which would centralize Germany’s signals intelligence gathering. While I still have found little in the press in English or German, this longer Spiegel article outlines the concerns it has raised and the mood in Germany a bit more.

Germany Plans to Centralize Intelligence-Gathering Activities

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wants to set up a central communications monitoring agency in Cologne for use by the police and intelligence agencies, modeled after the US’s NSA and the UK’s GCHQ. But critics fear the creation of a powerful new super-agency.

When Deputy Interior Minister August Hanning starts talking about his latest official visit to the United Kingdom, the otherwise unemotional security expert waxes altogether enthusiastic.

The former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, describes a superforce of highly-trained specialists who sit at the most powerful and expensive computers where, in loyal service to Her Majesty the Queen, they pursue the delicate task of monitoring, recording, and evaluating electronic communications. Everything top secret, of course, and extremely effective.

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is the name of the agency that made such an impression on Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s deputy minister. The listening post is situated on the outskirts of Cheltenham and is housed in a ring-shaped complex that cost €1.8 billion ($2.8 billion) to build. It employs a staff of around 4,000 and is considered by experts to be the most modern facility of its kind in the world, on a par with the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States. Enigma, the legendary German encryption machine used during World War II, is on display in an in-house museum and is the organization’s most prized trophy. It was the staff of GCHQ’s predecessor who cracked the supposedly unbreakable code, making it possible to decipher German radio communications from 1940 onwards.

As was the case with the cracking of the Enigma code back then, Hanning is convinced that agencies like GCHQ will make all the difference in today’s world—except that today security authorities see their main enemy as being Islamist terrorism inspired by Osama bin Laden.

The only problem is that no agency comparable to GCHQ exists in Germany. There is the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA), the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), and the Federal Police. All four currently have their own separate systems for monitoring communications. And that’s just at the national level—there are also numerous law enforcement and security agencies at the level of Germany’s 16 federal states. All in all, there are more than 75 separate monitoring facilities in operation nationwide—and they are frankly not very effective compared to the central monitoring stations in the UK and US.

This is likely to change in the near future. On orders from Schäuble’s ministry, a BKA project group has been working since April on the ambitious plan of giving Germany its own central agency for communications monitoring, known in the trade as signals intelligence. This large-scale monitoring initiative is the latest in a series of bold security policy reforms Schäuble has proposed—and is one that is particularly controversial.

Read the rest here.

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