Our intelligence agencies seem to be doing a good job

Are you sure?

Because from what we have heard so far all of this was the result of good old nitty-gritty police work.

Thanks to public investigation into the various problems the BND has, we meanwhile got a good impression of what is really going on in our "intelligence" agency. And every little detail we have learned so far indicates that the BND in its current form couldn't even catch a cold, if somebody sneezed in their face.

For example: BND boss chosen by political reliability rather than competence (in fact: utter incompetence seems to be an asset for the job), critically underfunded, badly trained staff which is bored and highly unreliable, lacking any sense of morals whatsoever, hiding vital information from police sources, hiding critical details about what they do from the very democratic council that is meant to control their work, killing court-cases by illegally paying criminals to allegedly plant evidence and then lie about it to the court, knowingly destroying evidence in a criminal investigation, allegedly committing treason by spying on their own citizens in order to gather intelligence material to "trade" with the NSA--and the list still goes on! So far this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Meanwhile all the supposed "success stories" their boss openly bragged about in front of MPs turned out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Honor where honor is actually due. And this honor belongs solely to the policemen in the field and the citizens and immigrants who aided them in their work.