Sécurité intérieure : surveiller pour protéger ?

Overview

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) was founded in 1950 and, since reunification, has relied on the 1990 German Constitutional Protection Act to provide an "early warning system" against threats to democracy. While this intelligence service has been targeting far-left groups and radical Islamists for decades, its critics recently accused it of being "blind in the right eye" - in other words, of neglecting the rise in violence attributed to the far right. Indeed, the institution was powerless to thwart the series of fatal attacks perpetrated between 2000 and 2011 by the neo-Nazi group Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU, "National Socialist Underground"), sparking astonishment and an avalanche of criticism in Germany.