Das BMI hat einen 691-seitigen Referentenentwurf veröffentlicht (5. Juli 2026, derzeit in der Ressortabstimmung, Verbändestellungnahmen angefordert), der das deutsche Nachrichtendienstrecht von Grund auf neu schreibt: ein neues BVerfSchG, ein neues BNDG und erstmals ein eigenes Stammgesetz für den Unabhängigen Kontrollrat (UKRat), dazu sechzehn Änderungen an Gesetzen vom Vereinsgesetz bis zur Abgabenordnung.

Der Entwurf macht einige sehr merkwürdige Züge. Ein paar davon gehe ich hier durch.

Wer so etwas entwirft, entwirft einen Werkzeugkasten unter der Annahme, die AfD werde niemals das Innenministerium übernehmen. Aufgebaut wird eine Lizenz zur Täuschung und Intervention im Inland, mit einer Aufsicht, die in einem einzigen Gremium gebündelt ist — dessen Vorabkontrolle die Amtsleitung per selbstzertifizierter Eilbedürftigkeit aufschieben kann. Aufschieben, ja, technisch keine Umgehung, weil die Anordnung ohne Bestätigung außer Kraft tritt. Aber mal ehrlich: Bei verdecktem Fire-and-Forget wird die gesamte Aufsichtsbürokratie bedeutungslos. Falschinformationen sind injiziert, Daten gelöscht — das sind längst entlaufene Pferde, nachdem das Scheunentor offen stand. Die AfD schnallt sich vermutlich schon die Sporen an.

Deutschland hat derzeit eine kremltreue, NS-affine Partei an oder nahe der Spitze der Bundesumfragen. Die Weimar-Lektion, präzise formuliert, lautet nicht, dass der Staat zu schwach oder zu stark war. Sie lautet: Die Verteidiger der Verfassung bauten Instrumente, die intakt an ihre Feinde übergeben wurden. Die Gestapo hat die preußische politische Polizei nicht aufgebaut; sie hat sie per Preußenschlag geerbt.

Vor allem die Polizeipräsidenten werden ausgetauscht. Hitlers SA- und SS-Mannen haben keinen Grund mehr, die preußische Polizei zu fürchten.

Es sind die handwerklichen Fehler dieses Dokuments, die das Erbrisiko katastrophal machen. Ein gut instrumentiertes System bindet jeden, der es benutzt; wir haben immer gesagt: leicht richtig zu benutzen, schwer falsch zu benutzen. Der BMI-Entwurf ist stattdessen fail-open — wie eine geladene Waffe, ausgehändigt mit abgefeilter Sicherung und einem regenbogenfarbenen „Do no evil“-Aufkleber darauf.

Man nehme die neuen „Effizienz“-Behauptungen. Auf dem Papier sieht es nach Aufsicht aus, denn der Entwurf dehnt die Vorabkontrolle auf weitere Maßnahmetypen aus und behält den Namen der BfDI sogar in einer Paragraphenüberschrift. Aber Aufsicht heißt Redundanz, und davon gibt es keine. Drei unabhängige Kontrollinstanzen (G10-Kommission, BfDI, UKRat) werden zu einer einzigen komprimiert. Die G10-Kommission, 1968 als verfassungsrechtlicher Preis für die Einschränkung des Art. 10 geschaffen, ist einfach weg — ihre Abschaffung als Haushaltseinsparung verbucht. Redundante, sich überlappende Kontrolleure sind das Rückgrat jeder Aufsicht, das Gegenteil von Verschwendung: vorgelagerte Investitionen, die einander gegenprüfen und nicht alle gleichzeitig vereinnahmt oder ausgehungert werden können, was nachgelagerte, teure Katastrophen verhindert. Wenn interner und externer Prüfer dieselbe Person sind, die an sich selbst berichtet, reden wir über Enron (ich habe bei Arthur Andersen eine Computer-Risk-Praxis über fünf Bundesstaaten geleitet, ich kann davon erzählen). Der Entwurf stellt ein einziges Gremium mit gerade einmal 8,86 Mio. Euro pro Jahr auf, um einen Apparat zu kontrollieren, der allein für den IT-Betrieb des BfV 269 Mio. Euro pro Jahr ausgibt. Dreißig zu eins, Fähigkeit zu Kontrolle — als ließe sich Kontrolle abwerten, obwohl sie der Werthebel der Fähigkeit ist. Am falschen Ende gespart.

Man nehme, als weiteres Beispiel, die deutsche Geschichte. Das Trennungsgebot existiert wegen des Polizeibriefs und des Gestapo-Präzedenzfalls: eine Behörde, die zugleich beobachtete und handelte, verdeckt, ohne richterliches Verfahren. Dieses Dokument erwähnt auf 691 Seiten weder Gestapo noch Stasi noch die historische Begründung der Trennung. Der Entwurf zitiert ausschließlich BVerfG-Rechtsprechung ab 2013, als wäre das Prinzip eine datenschutzrechtliche Formalie und nicht eine Geschichtslektion namens „Nie wieder“.

Der vielleicht sonderbarste Zug von allen, sonderbarer noch als Deutschlands Weigerung, den NS-Präzedenzfall zu benennen: Automatisiertes Hackback wird damit begründet, menschliche Prüfung leiste „keine relevante Qualitätssicherung“.

Ein Zwischenschritt menschlicher Bearbeitung leistet hier keine relevante Qualitätssicherung, verzögert aber Abwehr erfolgsgefährdend.

Das ist verkehrt herum, gemessen am Kanon des Hackback wie an der Automationssicherheit. Mit einem Wort: Bockmist. Ein Gegner, der eine automatisierte Reaktion kartiert, besitzt sie: Wer die Auslösebedingungen lernt, kann staatliche Gegenmaßnahmen in Friendly Fire umlenken. Der Entwurf deutet Qualität an (Genauigkeit, Robustheit, Cybersicherheit — Kriterien aus der EU-KI-Verordnung entlehnt, von deren Geltung er sich zugleich ausnimmt) und quantifiziert nichts. Keine Fehlertoleranz, keine Schwelle für Attributionssicherheit, keine Drittschadensanalyse, nichts. Die automatisierten Maßnahmen selbst — Umleitung von Datenverkehr und Löschung von Daten — liegen genau in der Kategorie geteilter Infrastruktur, in der Fehlattribution unbeteiligte Dritte trifft: „Angreifer“-Daten auf einem kompromittierten Host gelöscht, und der Server eines Opfers ist zerstört. Das sind sehr, sehr alte Streitpunkte des Hackback, die hier null Beachtung finden: Wir haben das 2013 auf meinem Blog verhandelt — und der Entwurf übernimmt die unterlegene Seite ohne die Debatte. Die Begrenzung auf Cyberangriffs-Kontexte ist eben genau: geteilte Infrastruktur, umstrittene Attribution, Maschinengeschwindigkeit. Automation im Wilden Westen, wo man sie am wenigsten will.

Bemerkenswert: Das Wort Desinformation beschreibt im Entwurf ausschließlich Gegner (z. B. Russland), nie deutsche Maßnahmen. Wenn der Inlandsnachrichtendienst dasselbe tut (§ 60 Absatz 2 Nummer 1 Buchstabe c: Falschinformationen über Vertrauenspersonen in Netzwerke einspeisen, um Verhalten zu steuern), heißt es „Schutzmaßnahme“. Es ist aber dasselbe. Das erinnert daran, wie lange vor der Bundesrepublik Nicolais Abteilung IIIb Desinformation als Aufklärung betrieb. Wo hier der Euphemismus auftaucht, sehe ich eine inländische Täuschungslizenz — eine Lizenz zur Desinformation — für die Behörde, deren Auftrag die Beobachtung politischer Bestrebungen ist.

Deutschland hat soeben staatliche Desinformation ins Gesetz geschrieben. Deutschland. Ausgerechnet. Deutschland.

Schon 2012 habe ich weltweit offen für Hackback geworben, und 2023 hielt ich am National Security Seminar der William & Mary Law School einen Vortrag mit dem Titel „The Heaviest of Burdens: Hackback“. Irgendwo hier liegt noch das Schützenvereins-T-Shirt als Beweis. Ich bin also nicht die übliche Bürgerrechtsstimme. Und gerade als langjähriger, führender Hackback-Befürworter, wenn auch zugegeben ein alter Seebär, sage ich: Dieses Dokument riecht nach Kunstfehler.

Die verfassungsfeindliche Partei bekämpft man mit dem öffentlichen, gerichtlichen Instrument, das genau dafür gebaut wurde Artikel 21, damit Deutschland nie wieder eine geheime politische Polizei braucht. Richtig? Ist das Mikro an? 1932 versagte der Rechtsweg, weil er erst kam, nachdem der Apparat den Besitzer gewechselt hatte. Die Transparenz gut konstruierter, fail-safe gebauter Instrumente ist das, was feindliche Übernahmen übersteht — während das eilige, selbstzertifizierte, verdeckte Zeug wie dieses hier später stets als stumpfes Übernahmeinstrument studiert wird.

The German BMI has published a 691-page Referentenentwurf (5 July 2026, currently in interministerial coordination, with stakeholder comments requested) that rewrites German intelligence law from the ground up: a new BVerfSchG, a new BNDG, and a standalone statute for the Unabhängiger Kontrollrat (UKRat) for the first time, plus sixteen amendments to laws from the Vereinsgesetz to the Abgabenordnung.

It makes some very strange moves. I’ll go through a few here.

Whoever drafts this is drafting a toolkit on the assumption the AfD will never hold the Innenministerium. They are standing up a domestic deception-and-intervention license, with oversight consolidated into a single body whose pre-approval the agency head can defer on self-certified urgency. I said defer, yes, technically not a bypass, because the order lapses if unconfirmed. But come on people, in a covert fire-and-forget the whole oversight bureaucracy becomes meaningless: false information injected and data wiped are typically long-gone horses after the barn door was opened. The AfD are probably strapping on their spurs in anticipation.

Germany currently has a Kremlin-aligned Nazi-adjacent party at or near the top of federal polls. The Weimar lesson for anyone paying attention, precisely stated, is not that the state was too weak or too strong, it’s that defenders of the constitution built instruments that were handed intact to its enemies. The Gestapo didn’t build the Prussian political police; it inherited it via Preußenschlag.

Vor allem die Polizeipräsidenten werden ausgetauscht. Hitlers SA- und SS-Mannen haben keinen Grund mehr, die preußische Polizei zu fürchten.

EN: (It is primarily the police chiefs who are being replaced. Hitler’s SA and SS men no longer have any reason to fear the Prussian police.)

The engineering failures of this document are what make the risks of inheritance catastrophic. A well-instrumented system means constraining anyone and everyone; we always used to say make it easy to use right, hard to do wrong. The BMI document instead is fail-open, like a loaded weapon handed out with the safety filed off and a rainbow colored “do no evil” sticker on it.

Look at the new “efficiency” claims, for example. On paper it looks like there is oversight because the draft extends pre-approval to more measure types and even keeps the BfDI’s name on a section header. However, oversight means redundancy, and there’s none of that. Three independent overseers (G10-Kommission, BfDI, UKRat) compress into a single one. The G10-Kommission, created in 1968 as the constitutional price of restricting Art. 10, is simply gone, its elimination booked as budget savings. Redundant, overlapping overseers are the spine of oversight, meaning the opposite of a waste: they are upstream investments that cross-check each other and can’t all be captured or starved at once, which prevents downstream costly disasters. When your internal and external auditor are the same person reporting to themselves, you are talking Enron (I managed a five-state Computer Risk practice at Arthur Andersen, I can tell you all about it). The draft has a single body funded at just €8.86M a year to control an apparatus spending €269M a year on BfV IT operations alone. Thirty to one, capability to control, as if to say control can be devalued when it’s the valuation lever on the capability. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Look at the history of Germany, for another example. The Trennungsgebot exists because of the Polizeibrief and the Gestapo precedent, where an agency both watched and acted, covertly, without judicial process. This document has zero mentions of Gestapo, Stasi, or the historical rationale for keeping separation. The draft cites only post-2013 BVerfG doctrine, as if the principle were a data-protection technicality rather than a lesson in history called “never forget”.

Perhaps the most peculiar move of all, even more than Germany refusing to acknowledge Nazi precedent, is that automated hackback is justified with “human review adds no relevant quality assurance.”

Ein Zwischenschritt menschlicher Bearbeitung leistet hier keine relevante Qualitätssicherung, verzögert aber Abwehr erfolgsgefährdend.

EN: (An intermediate step involving human processing provides no relevant quality assurance here, yet delays the response to a degree that jeopardizes success.)

That’s backwards, per the canon of hackback and per automation safety. Horseshit, in a word. Adversaries who map an automated response own it: learn the trigger conditions and you can redirect state countermeasures into friendly fire. The draft gestures at quality (accuracy, robustness, cybersecurity, criteria lifted from the EU AI Act while exempting itself from the EU AI Act) and has no quantification. No error tolerance, no attribution-confidence threshold, no third-party-harm analysis, nothing. The automated measures themselves, traffic redirection and data deletion, are placed in a shared-infrastructure category where misattribution costs hit innocent bystanders: “attacker” data wiped on a compromised host, and a victim’s server just got destroyed. These are very, very old talking points in hackback that get zero attention: we litigated this on my blog in 2013 and yet the draft adopts the losing side without the debate. The scope limitation to cyberattack contexts is in fact the shared infrastructure, contested attribution, and machine-speed response. That’s automation in the wild west where you want it the least.

Notably, the word Desinformation is used only to describe adversaries (e.g. Russia), never German measures. When the domestic intelligence service does it (§ 60(2)(1)(c), feeding false information through informants into networks to steer behavior) it gets branded “Schutzmaßnahme” instead. But it’s the same thing. This reminds me how way back before there was a Bundesrepublik, Nicolai’s Abteilung IIIb ran Desinformation as Aufklärung. When the euphemism appears here I see a domestic deception charter, license to perform disinformation, for the agency whose remit is observing political movements.

Germany just wrote state disinformation into statute. Germany. Of all places. Germany.

Back in 2012 I openly led hackback around the world, and I even gave a 2023 lecture titled “The Heaviest of Burdens: Hackback” at the National Security Seminar, William and Mary Law School. Somewhere around here I have the gun club t-shirt to prove it. I’m not the typical civil liberties voice here, in other words. As a long-time leading hackback advocate, although arguably a salty dog, this document smells like malpractice.

Fight the anti-constitutional party through the public, judicial instrument built for exactly this, Article 21, precisely so Germany never again needs a secret political police. Right? Is this thing on? In 1932 the judicial remedy failed because it arrived after the apparatus changed hands. The transparency of well-engineered fail-safe instruments is what survives hostile takeovers, while the rushed self-certified covert stuff like this always gets studied later as a blunt takeover instrument.

The herd is built for one safety, using cohesion against a predator. That instinct is so reliable, ironically it also becomes easy for a predator to manipulate and steal.

Here is how the theft works, to understand how the AfD seizes power. The predator declines to hunt the herd directly. It invents a second predator, points at it, and offers to lead the herd defense. The herd closes ranks. It closes them around the exact wrong thing.

Germany needs immigration. Germany does not need AfD. The demography is not in dispute: a fertility rate stuck near 1.4, well below replacement, and a workforce that shrinks without net arrivals. The Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung puts the gap around 400,000 net immigrants a year just to hold the labor force steady as the boomer cohort retires. Immigration is what keeps the pension system solvent and the factories staffed. It strengthens the herd. The AfD, self-described outsiders offering to “reform” the herd, points at that strength and names it the threat, then convinces the flock to break itself apart.

And the AfD response to fact is lies. You say a fact, they say can’t be true and that’s it. You say another fact, they say you can’t trust it and that’s it. Their signature move is to reactively undermine all trust systems, attack the cohesion that makes a herd safe and successful. Pick it apart with surface level lies, instant denial. Repeat.

This is the whole architecture of Nazism, and it was assembled from forgeries the movement plagiarized. The “stab in the back” fraud came from the wartime high command who knew why they lost, and Hindenburg spread it by 1919: falsely grousing Germany lost the war to betrayal at home rather than to actual surrender and loss in the field. That was a political move that pointed the herd inward, to attack its own defenders. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, fabricated by the Russian secret police and exposed as plagiarism by the Times of London in 1921, supplied a Jewish target for that political machinery. Judeobolshevism welded the two into one. The predator works lazily, using adoption and fusion. The counterfeit threats already in circulation were aimed at a vulnerable group, and fear was spun up with heated rhetoric to strip domestic resistance from its own path.

A Chancellor named Hitler was appointed (NOT ELECTED) in January 1933, The Reichstag burned in February 1933. Within a day the government held a decree suspending civil liberties, aimed fraudulently to stop an uprising that had been conjured for the occasion. The counterfeit threat wrote the emergency powers. The wolf told the frightened flock of sheep that the dogs and shepard were not their friend.

Dachau was opened in March 1933 to imprison anyone caught actually protecting the herd, or trying to keep it together. Its first prisoners were Communists and Social Democrats, the organized core of the herd’s defense. Weeks later, on 2 May 1933, the regime crushed the free trade unions in a single coordinated strike, occupying their halls, arresting their leaders, and absorbing the workers into a Nazi front. The unions were destroyed precisely because they existed to organize the herd against actual threats. Elections after that point were no longer free.

Creating the counterfeit predator has a major defect. There is no actual threat, so the fraud of fear it generates must be fed forever, and a machine built to fabricate threats eventually runs short of them. It inevitably can’t hide how it has thinned the herd it was guarding, eating its own. Within eighteen months the Nazi apparatus murdered its own leadership in the Night of the Long Knives. It managed a genocidal con for twelve years, which left Germany in ruins, lucky to be occupied before it self-eliminated entirely. The false threat is a device for converting a herd into prey and shamelessly naming that conversion to weakness a protection from outsiders.

The device continues to be used over and over. Trump is one example. Elon Musk and AfD are another. Replacement rhetoric is the same forgery: the whole lie of deliberate erasure by outsiders is sold as an excuse to allow a predator into power over the herd. The threat is invented. The herd effects are real. A UC Davis team led by Garen Wintemute measured that herd in PLOS ONE and again in 2024: a majority calling political violence justified, almost none willing to lift a hand themselves. Approval of self harm without agency. A flock becomes certain of a predator that is a fiction, while opening the door to a real one.

We reach for the fable, a boy who cried wolf, when talking about predators, because it’s such a compelling frame. Aesop gave us two animals and a liar who loses his flock to a real wolf that finally comes. The modern predator of AfD however, actually fuses the two into a wolf that cries not-sheep. The AfD is the wolf. They cry not-sheep while being the wolf, and the crying is the hunt. No real wolf arrives to vindicate the wolf’s alarm. There is only AfD, inside the flock, pointing at the treeline while he kills from behind.

The fable teaches the flock to distrust alarms, so the true warning about the actual wolf lands as a boy who always overreacts. The story of a boy who warns becomes the muzzle that lets the wolf, dressed as the boy, convince the flock to separate itself and give control to wolves warning against non-sheep.

Brexit was the Wolf platform. “Leave” sold the benefits of migrants instead as a “Breaking Point”, and claimed sovereignty was stolen when strengthened by Brussels. The threat was entirely forged, to hide the actual threat of being cut off. The severance was real, and the herd destroyed its own market. Britain’s economy has plummeted, and the EU is being targeted by the Russia/AfD with further leave campaigns.

The one defense that works is the thing the predator spends everything to break: cohesion. A herd that stays together, trades honestly, and trusts its own defenders cannot be preyed on easily. This is why the AfD wolf goes after the unions, the press, the courts, and the neighbor first. Forged fear is cheap and manipulates the herd into separation. So the predator does not build trust, it dismantles it to reduce everyone’s safety and prosperity except their own.

Auschwitz-Birkenau’s function was murder, genocide at industrial scale. A very similar looking and sounding facility called “Cato” in Scotland claims to be for future computation for an end user who remains unidentified, under an application whose statement of intent permits modification once one is found.

The uncertainty of use makes the appearance and description of the design the only evidence we can see on the table. The perimeter architecture has an unmistakable Holocaust camp style and scale. The entire design vocabulary is the classical canon (Greek mythology), deployed exactly as the Hitler regime deployed it, as legitimation for an enclosure. The landscaping is explained as screening, and whatever the motive, the effect is a “processing” facility removed from daily sight. The community benefit is a promised fund announced before any tenant, any figure, or any terms, a pledge with nothing behind it that anyone can verify.

The lesson from Nazi Germany is to notice these aesthetics, the classical framing and the screening methods are what enable the unthinkable without being noticed properly, the mechanism Jonathan Glazer put on screen in The Zone of Interest (2023): a family garden flourishing against the camp wall, the hedge doing the moral work.

The movie you see observes the mundane day-to-day lives of a well-off German family. Over and over, the father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), goes to and from work; the mother, Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), tends to her garden; and their children, a rambunctious bunch, play with their toys. In the movie you hear, however, there’s intermittent gunfire, bursts of screams, and an ever-present industrial cacophony. Along with snatches of dialogue and glimpses of details—the costuming, the barbed wire, the smoke—the film makes clear what’s going on: Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the real-life longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and this is a portrait of how he and his Nazi family actually lived, going about their days adjacent to the death camp he ran.

Let me put it like this. A 69-hectare double-fenced compound is apparently being named for a Stoic, dressed by Polykleitos, hidden by “bunds”, built for a tenant nobody will name. As a historian working in technology, the concerns are simple.

The Cato architects cite the ancient Greek stoa and the proportional ideas found in Polykleitos’s Canon, describing proportion, order and harmony as expressions of a deeper philosophical worldview. Polykleitos’s Canon was precisely the proportional system the Third Reich claimed as its aesthetic lineage. Riefenstahl’s Olympia opens with Myron’s Discobolus dissolving into the body of a living German athlete, the explicit visual argument that the Greek ideal survives in the Aryan body. Hitler personally purchased the Discobolus Palombara in 1938 and installed it in the Munich Glyptothek as ancestral property. Breker’s state sculpture carried the classical canon into the New Reich Chancellery, his bronzes flanking the court of honour. Günther and Rosenberg wrote the Greeks into Nordic race history as a formal doctrine.

It’s impossible to make this stuff up.

Nazis invoke antiquity as proportion, order, and harmony to confer civilizational legitimacy to an atrocity. To be clear, the canon itself belongs to everyone. Edinburgh calls itself the Athens of the North and keeps an unfinished Parthenon on Calton Hill. A colonnade proves nothing. The tell is the combination: classical dress, camp-scale perimeter, screening vegetation, and a function nobody will state. Any one element on its own is innocent, as you find all over the world. All four together fits a very narrow and specific pattern with a documented history.

Rudolf Höss stated that good train connections and the possibility of camouflaging the extermination process dictated the choice of Birkenau as the site. The SS planted a green belt of trees and hedges around Crematoria II through V, landscaping deployed as sightline management. Cato’s plan calls them landscape bunds, with new woodland, wetland, hedgerow, scrub, and wildflower meadow habitats wrapped around the security perimeter. Theresienstadt got its Verschönerung for the June 1944 Red Cross visit: fresh paint, gardens, a staged film, the enclosure marketed as a gift to its inhabitants.

The scale of all that used to be staggering. But one Cato data hall is about the size of fifty Birkenau barracks, due to advances in modern engineering. Birkenau contained approximately 300 barracks and buildings within about 140 hectares, single-story horse-stable barracks of roughly 400 m² each, giving a total built footprint somewhere around 120,000 m². Cato plans to put 160,000 m² of footprint into seven halls at 35 metres tall. Seven buildings, phased over several years, will exceed the combined footprint of the three hundred. It’s the kind of massive infrastructure that deserves extreme scrutiny because its impact can not be avoided, yet being setup with the kind of obfuscation that erases any evidence of it existing.