The German parliament has subjected the country’s intelligence service, the BND, to increased government scrutiny. But critics object that it also gives the BND wide-ranging new powers to spy on foreign nationals. 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.
