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Surveillance cameras in front of the headquarters of the Federal Intelligence Service in Berlin
Photo: Kay Nietfeld / dpa
The Karlsruhe judges could hardly have been clearer when they declared the previous BND law to be unconstitutional in May.
They considered it completely inadequate to regulate how the Federal Intelligence Service fishes information out of the worldwide data streams.
Above all, however, they did away with the Federal Government's view that the Basic Law does not apply to foreigners abroad: The judges unequivocally stated that surveillance has limits for them too.
Of course, they did not prohibit the BND from spying on e-mails, chats and phone calls abroad, because that was essential for the security of the Federal Republic.
Rather, the constitutional judges spelled out how a law on so-called strategic telecommunications intelligence must look in order to be constitutional.
Karlsruhe has seldom set such specific guidelines.
For months, government lawyers and experts from the "Technical Clarification" department at the BND pored over the judgment.
At the weekend, the Federal Chancellery sent its draft law to the other ministries for departmental coordination.
The document is 111 pages long and is available to SPIEGEL.
According to the law, the framework drawn by Karlsruhe is "adequately taken into account".
First, SZ, NDR and WDR reported on the draft.
"Independent Control Council"
The core of the law is the establishment of a new supreme federal authority, the "Independent Control Council" with offices in Berlin and Pullach, where the BND is based.
The Control Council will meet in top secret and will consist of six federal judges and federal prosecutors.
Its members are elected from among the ranks of the Bundestag.
In addition, there is an apparatus made up of specialists with technical expertise.
The "Independent Control Council" is to start its work in January 2022 and ensure that the BND complies with the new, significantly stricter requirements when monitoring abroad.
For example, the judges and federal prosecutors are supposed to check the search terms used by the secret service to filter out relevant news from the worldwide data streams.
These search terms can be specific e-mail addresses or cell phone numbers; more rarely, they are chemical formulas that are related to the manufacture of explosives.
So far, the BND employees record more than 150,000 communications every day, from which around 260 reports a day - on all topics and countries that are in the federal government's secret mission profile.
In order to be able to ensure that the BND adheres to the limits of spying, the new Control Council will also get some insight into a particularly sensitive area: the exchange with foreign secret services.
This was previously largely withdrawn from independent control.
In their work, the inspectors should also pay attention to how the BND deals with journalists, lawyers and other professional secrets abroad when monitoring global data flows.
The organization "Reporters Without Borders" and several journalists had submitted the constitutional complaint in Karlsruhe, which had overturned the previous BND law.
Surveillance jeopardizes the protection of their informants, they argued.
As SPIEGEL revealed in 2017, the BBC's international offices and the "New York Times" were on the BND's pick-up list in the past.
In the future, journalists and lawyers are to be better protected, but researching their e-mails, messages and phone calls is not completely excluded.
According to the draft law, your protected communication may exceptionally be monitored to clear up "serious dangers" - and only if the "Independent Control Council" agrees.
According to the Federal Government's explanatory memorandum for the law, alleged journalists who carry out propaganda for the "Islamic State" are not protected from being spied on.
The same applies to reporters who work for "state press organs of authoritarian states" or "consciously produce fake news under the guise of journalism".
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