Countries and Regions
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The Federal Government’s »fact checkers«
Germany’s role in the world has changed. The Federal Government is actively contributing to solving conflicts like those in Ukraine or Mali and is fighting the causes for flight worldwide.
Furthermore, digitization and social media have made our world more transparent. Important events can be followed in real time anywhere in the world. However, actual facts are very difficult to filter out. False claims are spread through fake news, which private persons often do not recognize at all, and even intelligence services are able to do so only by spending a lot of time and money.
Using intelligence methods
In order to make the right decisions in situations like that, the Federal Government depends on reliable information from those regions. It needs to know things such as the interests the actors involved have, which methods they may use or what their plans are. The Bundesnachrichtendienst is authorized to provide such information. We are allowed to use the entire spectrum of our intelligence methods to this end:
undercover handling of human sources (HUMINT),
signals intelligence (SIGINT),
analysing open as well as protected sources (OSINT) and
satellite and aerial image intelligence (IMINT).
Contributing to the decision-making process on foreign and security policy matters
The BND, being Germany’s foreign intelligence service, has the statutory mission of collecting information on states and regions named in the Federal Government’s Mission Profile, which is classified »secret«.
We pass on our analyses on political, economic and military conditions in those areas to the Federal Government’s departments and are available to them for expert talks.
