Whom Can You Trust?

I. A Question in the Morning

“Can we still trust our own intelligence service?” With this question Der Spiegel opened its morning briefing on 8 October 2026. Two days earlier, officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office had arrested August Hanning, president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, from 1998 to 2005, together with his former head of office, Manfred D. The Federal Public Prosecutor is investigating on suspicion of treasonous espionage, gathering state secrets, attempted treason and acting as a secret agent.

According to what is known so far, D. is alleged to have passed almost two thousand internal, partly classified documents of the service to Hanning between 2010 and 2022, and to have been paid for it. Hanning is alleged to have used them in his work as a private security consultant. Whether any material reached a foreign service is unclear. Both are presumed innocent, and this text passes no judgement on them. It asks something else: how it came to light.

II. How It Came to Light

Manfred D. was head of office to several BND presidents from 2012 until March 2026. He did not sit at the edge of the organisation but at the point through which everything passes. The alleged leaking went on for twelve years. During that time there was a parliamentary oversight committee, a G10 commission for interceptions, from 2022 an Independent Control Council, a Federal Data Protection Commissioner and an internal security department. None of them noticed anything.

It was noticed by the Hamburg state police, in an entirely different matter. In September 2025 they searched Hanning’s premises in connection with the abduction of Christina Block’s children, an involvement he denies. The search produced the leads that resulted in the present arrests. The BND says it then launched “extensive internal investigations early and without delay”. That may be true. But someone else found the thread, from outside and by chance.

That is the real finding. Not that a trusted person may have abused that trust. This happens in every organisation, in every country and in every age. But that the system meant to find exactly such cases did not find this one.

III. The Wrong Question

“Whom can you trust?” is a question about persons. It demands an answer of the kind: this one yes, that one no. Orders that work ask differently. They ask who is allowed to look.

Every allotment association knows this. The treasurer may be the most honest person in the world, yet once a year two auditors check his books. The members elect them, not the treasurer. Nobody feels this as distrust of him. It even protects him, for whoever has been audited is cleared.

Food inspectors arrive at a restaurant kitchen unannounced. An announced visit would only measure how well a kitchen can tidy up. In a bank, nobody opens the vault alone. The rule that two people are always needed implies nothing about either of them. It ensures that trust in any single person does not matter.

And then there are cases in which the sensor belonged to the very party it was supposed to measure. Before 2008, issuers of securities paid the rating agencies that rated those securities. At Wirecard, a major audit firm signed off for years on accounts in which 1.9 billion euros turned out to be missing. It was uncovered by journalists of the Financial Times and by short sellers, that is, by outsiders. In 2019 the German financial supervisor filed a criminal complaint, against the journalists.

Democracy is, at its core, built-in distrust. Separation of powers, elections for limited terms, independent courts and a free press exist so that nobody has to be trusted blindly. Trust is needed precisely where control is missing. Where much trust is demanded, that is no compliment to the trustworthy. It is a sign that nobody can look.

IV. Three Rules of Construction

Three rules follow from these examples. They apply to an association as much as to an intelligence service.

First: whoever is measured does not measure. The body that checks must not be paid or chosen by the one it checks, nor depend on his information. A check that only sees what it is shown is a performance.

Second: checking is routine, not an event. Whoever looks only when there is a suspicion finds only what has already been noticed. The auditor comes every year, the food inspector comes without cause. A sensor that responds only by chance is no sensor.

Third: power grows only in step with the ability to check it. Whoever gives a machine more force tests the brake first. Built the other way round, the fault shows only in the bend.

We have asked the same question elsewhere about artificial intelligence, in “Who Is Allowed to Look”. There are many rules by now. What is missing is the body that is actually allowed to look inside. With intelligence services it is no different.

V. The Reform in the Light of the Case

Der Spiegel laments that the affair comes “of all times, now”. In August the federal government adopted a 732-page bill that would allow the services far more than before. The BND would be allowed to attack foreign IT systems, alter and delete data, pre-emptively shut down servers of state hacker groups and tamper with shipments on sabotage routes. It would be allowed to penetrate the systems of large platforms and to store content for six months and connection data for twelve months without prior review. Time pressure also comes from the Federal Constitutional Court, which in 2024 declared parts of the existing surveillance unconstitutional and set a deadline at the end of 2026.

On one point Der Spiegel is right. The threats are real, from Russia and from a friendship with the United States that can no longer be relied upon. A country needs a strong foreign intelligence service. It is also fair to note that the bill strengthens oversight in one place: the Independent Control Council is to approve particularly deep intrusions in advance, much like a court.

But what lies on the other side of the scale weighs more. The G10 commission is to be abolished. The Data Protection Commissioner loses powers, and already today she cannot force access to the BND, as the Federal Administrative Court has ruled. Information about the services is to be largely exempted from the citizens’ right to freedom of information. The complete list of intelligence methods is to be kept in a secret service regulation. The powers grow, the visibility shrinks.

The Hanning case has therefore not come at the wrong time. It is a measurement, and it shows something none of the existing bodies can capture. The oversight bodies check whether the service’s operations are lawful. None of them checks whether files are being carried out of the president’s outer office. Whoever says “of all times, now” treats the measurement as a disturbance. An engineer would increase the force only once he knows why the brake did not respond for twelve years.

VI. The Revolving Door

One detail of the case deserves attention of its own. The suspicion is directed against a former president who is alleged to have sold his knowledge as a private consultant after leaving office. Whoever leaves an office takes along contacts, knowledge and loyalties. This applies in both directions of the revolving door.

Until the end of March 2020, Friedrich Merz was chairman of the supervisory board of BlackRock Germany, the subsidiary of the world’s largest asset manager. That he governs on its behalf today is not proven, and whoever claims it needs evidence. The stronger objection needs none. Someone who has lived long in one world thinks in its categories and honestly takes its interests for the common good. Nobody has to be bribed for that. We have described this elsewhere: corrupted, not corrupt. Against corruption, criminal law helps. Against being corrupted, only construction helps.

Does the saying about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse then also apply to the voters? We do not believe most voters are naive. Few of them trusted a candidate. They chose what seemed least bad to them. Whoever can only choose between offers he does not trust is not naive but without an alternative. A German ballot paper does not even offer a way to express that. That is the subject of “The Missing Form”.

VII. Who Is Allowed to Look?

There is no good answer to Der Spiegel’s question, because it is the wrong question. Whether the BND can be trusted does not depend on who happens to run it. It depends on whether someone who does not belong to it can look inside, regularly and without cause, and whether that someone grows stronger when the service grows stronger.

In the Hanning case, that someone was a Hamburg police unit that was actually looking for something else entirely. That it found something was luck. An order whose most important safeguard is luck deserves no trust. It needs a better construction.

Trust is what remains when nobody is allowed to look. Why should a democracy rely on it?