The Secret Services Fight a Defensive Battle

The constitutional protection report will be published in Berlin on Wednesday. During the course of the National Security Agency scandal, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution also encountered criticism. The Home Secretary de Maizière and President Maaßen now have to prove the Office’s raison d’être.

When Germany’s Home Secretary Thomas de Maizière and the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution Hans-Georg Maaßen present their report on the protection of the constitution for the previous year on Wednesday afternoon in Berlin, something will already be clear: Events of this sort will no longer account for innocence. Indeed, they automatically become a defensive battle.

Of course, secret services have their own justification, despite what critics believe. For example, they occupy themselves with the question of how many German Islamists move to Syria and what they do when they come back.

By now, we wonder why American secret services had not anticipated the brewing of the Islamic terror group in Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS. The like occurred in 2011, as the National Socialist Underground’s actions came to light. In short: Declaring those undercover as superfluous then simultaneously asking for their help does not seem to add up. Their opponents do appear to be slightly bigoted.

Who Protects Citizens?

The real problem during today’s presentation of the constitutional protection report will admittedly boil down to explaining who protects citizens’ constitutional rights. Indeed, after the NSU scandal, the defense of the constitution was yet again discredited within a short period because of the NSA spy affair, although not in such an extreme way as the Federal Intelligence Service.

The general finding reads as follows: The secret services do not use many resources but cause an enormous amount of damage. It is difficult to incapacitate it; for instance, as they do not want to harm future successes, they will only openly reveal secret working methods and successes under certain conditions. One is therefore keen to find out whether de Maizière and Maaßen will be able to spread their message within such circumstances.