The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the leading domestic intelligence agency in Germany, operates “hundreds” of fake right wing accounts that it uses to infiltrate right wing political networks, according to a report by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Based on interviews with a BfV agent, the reporter who broke the story, Ronen Steinke, said that not only are BfV agents allowed to agitate and inflame the passions of the networks they infiltrated, but they are also allowed to commit criminal offences.
“In order to be really credible, it’s not enough to share or like what others say, you also have to make statements yourself,” said the unnamed agent.
“This means that the agents also bully and agitate,” said Steinke. “To a certain extent, they are also allowed to commit criminal offences.”
An unnamed head of a local BfV field office said the tactics are “the future of information gathering,” in a comment to the newspaper.
According to Steinke, the BfV has invested in online right wing infiltrators since 2019.
“Many right-wing radicals probably have no idea how many accounts in their chat groups are already agents,” said Steinke.
The agent who spoke to Steinke said that inflaming the right wing circles they infiltrated was part of the job.
“Of course, I encourage people in their world view,” said the agent. “You feed this bubble.”
Intelligence agencies have been infiltrating political activist organizations for decades. The FBI’s program of surveilling domestic political activists dates to at least the 1950s.
While much of that early work, which took place against the backdrop of the Cold War, focused on communist and far-left activists, today’s western intelligence agencies have turned their attention to targeting critics of election fraud, mass immigration, globalism, and official COVID-19 policies, all of which have been labeled “right wing” positions by elites.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.