German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) this week proposed to centralise Germany's cyber security in the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Until now, cybersecurity has been a state matter and the BIS only provides administrative assistance, and that is also what the Constitution says.

But due to rising cybercrime, theMinister of the Interior now wants to take matters into her own hands and, if necessary, amend the Constitution for this purpose. Because this would be necessary for a "modern, high-tech and digitalised industrial state like Germany". This change would be necessary in particular because of the dangers posed by Russia's war against Ukraine; in addition, the federal states would not be up to the task in the long term. However, even if the war and the associated dangers for the FRG are placed in the foreground, Faeser admits other motives for her proposal: These range from hacker attacks, hatred and agitation on the internet to sexual violence against children and young people. Furthermore, there are repeated attacks on critical infrastructure and targeted disinformation. Thus, it would not only be a matter of military and economic issues, but, as IT State Secretary Markus Richter puts it, also of protecting the 'open pluralistic society'. In the past, however, such statements have been more about censorship and bans than about protecting real freedom of expression on the internet. For if cybersecurity were truly centralised, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior would have a free hand in how it exercised it. According to Faeser's statements, she has received positive feedback on her proposal, other sources contradict this and there has also been criticism of the planned centralisation from individual federal states. How the discussion will develop now and what will be implemented in the end will become clear in the coming weeks/months. But the planning of further centralisation alone is a further confirmation of the fascist tendency of the bourgeois state.
The fact that surveillance on the net is becoming stronger is also not an isolated phenomenon in the FRG. Only in May, social resistance formed against a plan of the European Commission to be allowed to access encrypted messages from messenger services like Whatsapp, Signal or Threema - which contradicts the right to encrypted communication agreed in the coalition agreement of the gGerman government. Here, too, one reason given was the depiction of sexual violence against children.