Konstantin von Notz

Konstantin von Notz (born 21 January 1971 in Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein) is a German lawyer and a politician of Alliance 90/The Greens. He has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009, returned on the Schleswig-Holstein state list while standing in constituency 10, Herzogtum Lauenburg – Stormarn-Süd. Since 2013 he has been a deputy chair of the Green parliamentary group.

He grew up in Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main. He took his Abitur at the Freiherr-von-Stein-Schule in Frankfurt, performed civilian service with the Bahnhofsmission at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, studied law at Heidelberg University, and wrote a doctoral dissertation in Protestant church law. He completed his legal clerkship and second state examination at the Landgericht Lübeck and has practised as a lawyer in Mölln since 2004. He joined the Greens in 1995 and has sat on the Mölln town council since 2004. He is married and has two children.

From 2009 to 2013 he was the Green group's spokesperson for interior policy and for internet policy, and its rapporteur on the study commission "Internet and Digital Society"; he has been a full member of the Interior Committee since 2009. From 2013 to 2017 he was the group's rapporteur on the first committee of inquiry of the 18th Bundestag, which examined surveillance attributed to the National Security Agency and cooperation by the Federal Intelligence Service. In a 2015 essay in Der Spiegel he wrote that the federal government had supplied files late, incomplete and heavily redacted, and had refused to allow the committee to question Edward Snowden, whom the committee had unanimously named a key witness.

He has sat on the Parliamentary Control Panel, which oversees the federal intelligence services, since 2017, as deputy chair until 2021 and as chair from his election on 24 March 2022 through the end of the 20th legislative term. In the 21st Bundestag he is again deputy chair of that panel and a full member of the Interior Committee, and a deputy member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, the election committee, and the Joint Committee of the Bundestag and Bundesrat under Article 53a of the Basic Law. At the federal election of 23 February 2025 he received 14.0 percent of the first votes in Herzogtum Lauenburg – Stormarn-Süd, behind CDU candidate Henri Schmidt, and kept his seat from fourth place on the Green state list.

Early life and family

Childhood and parents

Konstantin von Notz was born on 21 January 1971 in Mölln, in Schleswig-Holstein. He has written that he grew up in Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main. A 2010 profile in Stern placed that childhood in Frankfurt, and he later said that he had never lived in Mölln even though he felt closely tied to the town.

His father, Friedhelm von Notz, died on 3 January 2008 at the age of 72 and was buried on 11 January in Mölln. For 26 years he was managing director of the publishers' committee (Verleger-Ausschuss) of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels. He retired from that post in 2000, remained geschäftsführender Vorstand of the Ausgleichsvereinigung Verlage, and received the Börsenverein's plaque "Dem Förderer des deutschen Buches." He was also deputy speaker of the Deutsche Literaturkonferenz and chair of the labour and social-affairs committee of the German Cultural Council, and from 1987 to 2007 deputy chair of the advisory board of the Künstlersozialkasse, the artists' social-insurance fund.

His brother is Börries von Notz. Börries was born in Mölln and grew up in Frankfurt; after studying law and political science in Bonn he was admitted as a lawyer in 2004, and he was managing director of the Jewish Museum Berlin for more than five years until he left on 31 January 2014 to lead the Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg.

In a 2020 interview with Herder Korrespondenz, von Notz called his parents "maximally liberal people": not directly opposed to the church, but against deciding a child's convictions in advance. The magazine noted that he was baptized only as a youth, and the interview put his turn toward faith at the age of 13. He recalled his mother offering a year of confirmation classes as a free choice; he took it, and said he grew into religious life in a Frankfurt parish with a pastor he liked and an active youth group, later leading youth work himself. Even so, he said, the Christmas story was read at home on Christmas Eve, "perhaps out of a kind of Prussian sense of duty."

He has also described his father's childhood as shaping his own politics. Friedhelm, he said, was orphaned in the Second World War—Konstantin's grandfather killed in Russia in 1942, and his grandmother also dying in the war—and was raised not by that "rather progressive" father but by his great-grandfather Ferdinand von Notz, "the very image of a Prussian soldier," who would have turned 150 in 2020. Von Notz said he had always defined himself through Germany's failure under Nazi Germany, and that this family history left him closer to that generation.

Schooling and civilian service

From 1981 to 1991 he attended the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Schule in Frankfurt and passed the Abitur there in 1991; in 1989 he also received a high-school diploma in Moorhead, Minnesota. The school is a Gymnasium, founded in 1909 as the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gymnasium and renamed after 1945 for the Prussian reformer Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein. The Bundestag biography records the Abitur at the same school, spelling it Freiherr-von-Stein-Schule. He has said that he lived in the United States for a year.

Hans Lindenthal, a former civics teacher (Gemeinschaftskunde), told Stern that von Notz had been one of the engaged pupils and was always friendly.

After the Abitur he did Zivildienst, the civilian alternative to conscription, from 1991 to 1992 at the Bahnhofsmission in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. Stern described the mission as a place the bourgeois public normally avoided. Leif Murawski, a fellow Zivi there, called von Notz "correct and polite" and "astonishingly assured in dealing with the most different kinds of people." Their work, Murawski said, often involved older homeless people, prostitutes and people dependent on drugs.

Education and legal career

Law studies and doctorate

Konstantin von Notz studied law at Heidelberg University from 1993 to 1998 and passed the first state examination there in 1998. The Bundestag biography, which rests on the member's own information, records that Heidelberg course, a dissertation in Protestant church law, and the occupational title Volljurist, used for someone who has completed both state examinations in the qualification for judicial office. In an August 2013 reply on Abgeordnetenwatch he described the Heidelberg stay as nearly seven years, longer than the 1993–1998 course given in the dated biographies.

The dissertation, Lebensführungspflichten im evangelischen Kirchenrecht, was accepted at Heidelberg in 2002. The German National Library catalogs the printed book as that dissertation: a paperback of 320 pages, issued in 2003 by Peter Lang in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford and Vienna, as volume 10 of the series Schriften zum Staatskirchenrecht (ISBN 3-631-50074-2). Its subject headings place the work under church employment law, the Protestant church, conduct of life and legal duty, with Germany as the geographic heading.

The publisher's summary, also stored with the national-library record, describes duties of private conduct as a regular subject of legal theory and, above all, of church and labor-law practice. The difficulty it identifies is that the public treats the private lives of church staff as a measure of the credibility of the church's proclamation, while defining and enforcing such duties is hard because church service takes three forms: public-law employment, private-law contracts, and honorary office. The book gives particular attention to the honorary form.

A profile on the website of the Evangelical Church in Germany agrees on the 1993–1998 course and the 1998 first examination, but it dates the second state examination to 2002, the doctorate to 2003, and legal practice in Mölln to 2003–2009. Those later figures conflict with the national bibliography, which records a 2002 Heidelberg dissertation published in 2003, and with the Bundestag biography and von Notz's own account, which place the start of practice as a lawyer in Mölln in 2004.

Legal clerkship and practice

German qualification as a lawyer runs from the first state examination through the Referendariat, a period of practical training, to the second state examination. Von Notz dates the Referendariat to 2001–2004 and the second examination to 2004. The Bundestag biography, and the biography published by the Bundestag group of Alliance 90/The Greens, place both the Referendariat and the second examination at the Landgericht Lübeck. In the 2013 Abgeordnetenwatch reply he wrote that this stage took him back to Schleswig-Holstein and to the Lübeck court.

He has been a lawyer in Mölln since 2004. Parliamentary disclosures list the pre-mandate occupation as self-employed lawyer in Mölln, and he stated in 2013 that he worked as a lawyer there until he entered the Bundestag in 2009. The same disclosure regime continues to list a paid activity alongside the mandate, given on the Bundestag page as "Rechtsanwalt, Mölln" and on Abgeordnetenwatch as freelance legal practice ("Rechtsanwalt – freiberuflich"). That side-activity entry is recorded for the 2021–2025 term and for the term that began in 2025, and Abgeordnetenwatch shows it as last changed on 27 November 2025. The published entries identify the work as a legal practice in Mölln; they do not name clients or a specialist field.

Party membership and local office

Entry into Alliance 90/The Greens

Konstantin von Notz has been a member of Alliance 90/The Greens since 1995, the period in which he was a law student in Heidelberg. He has written that the membership began in Heidelberg and that from 2004 he belonged to the district association for Herzogtum Lauenburg, the Schleswig-Holstein Kreis that includes his hometown Mölln. From 2007 to 2011 he was speaker of that district association.

State-level work had started earlier. From 2002 to 2011 he was speaker of the Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft Demokratie und Recht of the Schleswig-Holstein Greens, one of the working groups through which the state party develops programme and debates policy.

Mölln council and deputy mayoralty

Von Notz has sat on the Mölln Stadtvertretung for the Greens since 2004. Under the town’s Hauptsatzung, councillors are styled Ratsherrin or Ratsherr. The council elected in 2023 has 38 members.

In June 2013 the Stadtvertretung elected him third deputy mayor (3. stellvertretender Bürgermeister), an honorary municipal post held alongside his seat in the Bundestag. The Hauptsatzung, adopted by the council on 17 June 2013, states that the mayor is elected for six years and that the first deputy bears the title Erste Senatorin or Erster Senator, referring the rest of the deputy-mayor rules to section 62 of the Schleswig-Holstein municipal code. Biographies through the 19th legislative period still listed him in the post from June 2013, and his own account dates its end to June 2023.

On 28 June 2023 the new council met in the Stadthauptmannshof and unanimously elected Katharina Hess of the CDU as Bürgervorsteherin. As deputies of the mayor it chose Hans-Hermann Albrecht (CDU), titled Erster Senator, Elke Heitmann (SPD) as second deputy mayor, and Regina Hälsig of the Greens as third deputy mayor. Von Notz remained a councillor: the Bundestag biography current in 2026 still records membership of the Stadtvertretung since 2004.

State party roles

From 2005 von Notz was a member of the Parteirat of the Schleswig-Holstein Greens. The state party treats that council as an advisory and decision-making body beside the Landesparteitag. It has 21 members, elected every two years: the seven members of the state executive and 14 others, of whom at most six may hold a Landtag, Bundestag or European mandate, including two representatives of the Green Youth. The biography for the 19th Bundestag still listed his membership; the biography for the 21st Bundestag does not, and he was not among the 21 people chosen on 12 October 2024, when the Herzogtum Lauenburg seat went to Robert Wlodarczyk.

For the Bundestag elections of 2009, 2013 and 2017 the state party placed him second on the Landesliste, behind a woman in first place. The federal Frauenstatut, in the text archived in 2013, requires lists in principle to alternate, with odd-numbered places reserved for women and even-numbered places open.

At the state congress in Rendsburg on 1 November 2008, Ingrid Nestle of Flensburg won first place in a third ballot with 58 of 106 valid votes, and von Notz, then a 37-year-old lawyer from Mölln, took second place with 74 of 107. The sitting Green Bundestag members from the state, Grietje Staffelt and Rainder Steenblock, did not stand again. The later parliamentary biography called him Spitzenkandidat for that election.

On 16 March 2013 a congress in Eckernförde elected Luise Amtsberg, a 28-year-old former Landtag member, to first place over the sitting Bundestag member Valerie Wilms, while von Notz held second place by a large majority against two other candidates. A dpa report said the state party was entering the campaign with Amtsberg and von Notz at its head, and the Bundestag biography again used Spitzenkandidat.

On 25 February 2017 the state association once more gave Amtsberg first place and von Notz, then deputy chair of the Bundestag group and its internet-policy spokesman, second place, with no opponent. politik&kommunikation reported that the two were leading the northern Greens into that September’s campaign. His own biography extends the word Spitzenkandidat to 2017; the 19th-term Bundestag text stopped at 2009 and 2013.

Bundestag elections

Constituency and list candidacies

Konstantin von Notz has been the direct candidate of Alliance 90/The Greens for Bundestag constituency 10, Herzogtum Lauenburg – Stormarn-Süd, in Schleswig-Holstein, at each federal election from 2002 through 2025. The constituency pairs most of the district of Herzogtum Lauenburg with southern Stormarn. He has not won its direct mandate.

Voters cast a first vote for a constituency candidate and a second vote for a state party list. The first-vote plurality fills the constituency seat, while second votes set each party's seat total in the state under mixed-member proportional representation; a defeated constituency candidate can still be seated in list order. The Bundestag's biography for the 18th term, drawn from the member's own account, records von Notz as the Green direct candidate in constituency 10 in 2002, 2005, 2009 and 2013, and as a member only from 2009, each time elected from the state list rather than in the constituency.

In 2005 his first-vote total was 9,499 (5.1 percent of 186,948 valid first votes). Carl-Eduard Graf von Bismarck of the Christian Democratic Union won the seat with 83,029 votes (44.4 percent), 642 ahead of the Social Democratic Party on 82,387 (44.1 percent). The two Green members returned from the Schleswig-Holstein list were Grietje Bettin and Rainder Steenblock.

For 2009 the Federal Returning Officer's list of members elected from state lists gives Ingrid Nestle place 1, von Notz place 2 and Valerie Wilms place 3; all three took list seats, and Norbert Brackmann (CDU) took the constituency. On 16 March 2013 a Green state congress in Eckernförde elected Luise Amtsberg to list place 1; the Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported that von Notz held his own list place against two challengers and that the two would lead the state ticket. The biography for the following Bundestag again lists him as elected from the state list. In 2017 Statistikamt Nord names him, with Amtsberg and Ingrid Nestle, among the Greens seated from the state list, while Brackmann again won the constituency.

In 2021 von Notz was list place 4 and was seated from the list. Robert Habeck won constituency 1, Flensburg – Schleswig, so he was not among the Green list members; those elected from the list included Amtsberg (place 1), Ingrid Nestle (place 3) and von Notz (place 4). For the election of 23 February 2025 the Schleswig-Holstein state returning officer's notice of 30 January 2025 admitted a Green list in the order Luise Amtsberg, Robert Habeck, Denise Loop and Dr Konstantin von Notz in places 1 to 4. The same day the constituency returning officer admitted von Notz as the Green candidate in constituency 10, alongside Nina Scheer (SPD) and Henri Schmidt (CDU).

Results from 2009 to 2025

Final first-vote counts for von Notz, and the constituency winners, were as follows. In each of these five elections he entered the Bundestag on the Green state list, not by winning the seat.

Year	First votes	Share	Constituency winner
2009	18,761	10.6%	Norbert Brackmann (CDU), 70,874 (39.9%)
2013	12,774	7.0%	Norbert Brackmann (CDU), 81,954 (45.2%)
2017	18,688	9.7%	Norbert Brackmann (CDU), 75,737 (39.5%)
2021	33,949	17.4%	Nina Scheer (SPD), 60,593 (31.0%)
2025	29,009	14.0%	Henri Schmidt (CDU), 67,642 (32.7%)

In 2009 he placed fourth, behind Brackmann, Gesa Tralau of the SPD (53,073) and Christel Happach-Kasan of the FDP (19,742), out of 177,684 valid first votes. The 2013 share, 12,774 votes and 7.0 percent, was the lowest of the series; Brackmann's 45.2 percent compared with 34.6 percent for the SPD. In 2017 he was third on 18,688 votes (9.7 percent), just ahead of Bruno Hollnagel of the Alternative for Germany (17,435; 9.1 percent), with Scheer second for the SPD on 27.2 percent.

His 33,949 votes in 2021 (17.4 percent) were his highest first-vote share and left him third, behind Scheer and Thomas Peters of the CDU (51,872; 26.6 percent). Scheer's 31.0 percent was the only direct win for the SPD in the constituency across these five elections. On 23 February 2025 the constituency returning officer recorded 29,009 first votes for von Notz, 14.0 percent of 206,631 valid first votes, fourth behind Schmidt, Scheer (48,275; 23.4 percent) and Arnulf Andreas Fröhlich of the AfD (35,418; 17.1 percent).

For that election a constituency winner was seated only where the party's second votes covered the seat; Schmidt is listed as elected in constituency 10, while some other constituencies were left vacant for lack of coverage. Von Notz was elected from Green list place 4. The party's Schleswig-Holstein second-vote total was 279,923 (14.9 percent), enough for four members: Amtsberg, who won Kiel, and Habeck, Loop and von Notz from the list.

Parliamentary offices

Interior committee and group leadership

Konstantin von Notz has been a member of the Bundestag for Alliance 90/The Greens since 2009, and the chamber's current biography records continuous membership of the interior committee over the same period. In the 19th and 20th electoral terms the archived biographies list him as an ordinary member of the Committee on the Interior and Heimat (Ausschuss für Inneres und Heimat). After the election of 23 February 2025 the body was again constituted as the Interior Committee (Innenausschuss). At that sitting, on 21 May 2025, the Bundestag named him among the committee's 42 ordinary members and among the six members from the Green group.

From 2009 to 2013 he was the spokesperson of the Green parliamentary group for interior policy and for net policy, and its Obmann — the member leading a group's work — on the study commission "Internet and Digital Society" (Enquete-Kommission „Internet und digitale Gesellschaft“). On 20 December 2013 the group elected him one of five deputy chairs and gave him Arbeitskreis 3, its internal circle for interior affairs, legal affairs and net policy. Bundestag biographies have described him as deputy group chair since 2013.

In the 21st term the group organizes its subject work in five divisions (Fachbereiche). Von Notz is political coordinator of Fachbereich 3. The group assigns that division democracy and a diverse society; freedom, civil rights and internal security; legal affairs and consumer protection; digital policy and a modern state; and sport and religion. The working groups under it are digital affairs and state modernization, the interior, petitions, legal affairs and consumer protection, sport and volunteering, and electoral scrutiny, immunity and the rules of procedure. The Rheinische Post reported that at the group's sitting on 29 April 2025 he was the only deputy-chair candidate to face a contest, which he won against the former parliamentary managing director Till Steffen.

The Bundestag's register of outside activities lists, as paid work alongside the mandate, practice as a lawyer in Mölln, the occupation it also records for the years before he entered parliament. The same biography lists a separate intelligence-oversight seat, on the Parliamentary Control Panel, distinct from the committee and group posts set out here.

Digital agenda, legal affairs and the joint committee

The biography archived for the 20th term states that he was the group's net-policy spokesperson from 2009 to 2017. The 19th-term biography, written while that term was under way, dates the net-policy spokesperson role specifically to 2013–2017, after the interior spokespersonship of 2009–2013.

In the 18th term he was the Green Obmann on the Committee on the Digital Agenda (Ausschuss Digitale Agenda). A Bundestag balance of the committee's work states that the plenary decided on 13 February 2014 to establish it and that, when it constituted itself on 19 February 2014, the groups named Tankred Schipanski, Lars Klingbeil, Halina Wawzyniak and von Notz as its Obleute; Jens Koeppen was elected chair and Gerold Reichenbach deputy chair. A Bundestag report of the constitutive sitting lists the Green members as Dieter Janecek and von Notz, and notes that the committee was to advise rather than take the lead on bills.

The 19th-term membership list does not place him on that committee. In the 20th term the archived biography lists him as a deputy member of the Committee on Digital Affairs (Ausschuss für Digitales) and of the Legal Affairs Committee (Rechtsausschuss), and as an ordinary member of the Joint Committee. The 21st-term biography does not list him on the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernization. It does list him as a deputy member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection (Ausschuss für Recht und Verbraucherschutz) and of the Wahlausschuss. He had already been a deputy member of the Wahlausschuss in the 19th term. Under section 6 of the Federal Constitutional Court Act, a twelve-member Wahlausschuss proposes the judges whom the Bundestag then elects to the Federal Constitutional Court.

Article 53a of the Basic Law provides for a Joint Committee of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, two-thirds Bundestag deputies and one-third Bundesrat members, which the federal government must inform of its planning for a state of defence. Von Notz was a deputy member of the Joint Committee in the 19th term, an ordinary member in the 20th, and is again a deputy member in the 21st.

Religious-policy brief

The biographies archived for the 19th and 20th terms describe him as the Green group's commissioner for religion and worldviews (Beauftragter für Religion und Weltanschauungen) from 2017 to 2021. In March 2018 Domradio reported the appointment as that of religious-policy spokesperson for the legislative period, held in addition to the deputy chair. In the 18th term that spokesperson role had been Volker Beck's. The Protestant news service reported on 20 December 2013 that the group had elected Beck its spokesperson for religious policy, succeeding Josef Winkler, who had not returned to the Bundestag.

The biography text used for the 21st term also attaches the words "Sprecher für Religionspolitik" to the years 2013–2017, in the same sentence as his role on the first committee of inquiry of that term. The 19th- and 20th-term biographies do not; they date the religion brief to 2017–2021, which is also how the December 2013 and March 2018 reports divide the spokespersonship between Beck and von Notz. No separate religion commissionership is listed among his Bundestag offices in the 21st term. Religion appears instead as one field of Fachbereich 3, the division he coordinates for the group.

Digital policy and civil liberties

Net neutrality and internet regulation

As net-policy spokesperson of Alliance 90/The Greens, von Notz pressed the Bundestag to legislate net neutrality. On 25 February 2011 the House debated a Green motion, “Gegen das Zwei-Klassen-Internet”, beside a text from Die Linke. Von Notz accepted limited network management but not paid preference for services. The SPD backed the aim but called the Green text imprecise; the governing CDU/CSU–FDP coalition saw no need to legislate.

On 12 November 2015 a CDU/CSU–SPD majority rejected a further Green motion requiring equal carriage and charging of data, a ban on paid “specialised services” and zero-rating, and only narrow security exceptions. Coalition speakers called it obsolete because the European Parliament had already adopted a regulation. Von Notz said the coalition had “flogged off” net neutrality there, citing Deutsche Telekom’s move to charge for priority transmission. Die Linke backed the Greens. Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 of 25 November 2015 requires equal treatment of traffic but allows reasonable management and specialised services on stated conditions.

At the first reading of the Network Enforcement Act on 19 May 2017, von Notz called hateful comments “a grave danger to our liberal democracy if they remain without consequence”, yet said platforms must not be made judges and opposed identity disclosure without a court. Die Linke’s Petra Sitte warned of lawful speech being deleted; CSU speakers rejected “deletion on stock”. After Twitter blocked the satire magazine Titanic in January 2018, he blamed overblocking on short deadlines and vague terms; the SPD defended the law. On 21 March 2024 SPD, Green and FDP votes, against the CDU/CSU and the AfD and with Die Linke abstaining, passed a law that largely repealed the NetzDG in favour of the EU Digital Services Act, already fully applicable since mid-February.

Data retention, encryption and privacy

On 2 March 2010 the Federal Constitutional Court voided Germany’s first data-retention law, a six-month store of traffic data. Storage of that length was not unconstitutional in principle, but the rules on security, purposes, transparency and remedies breached telecommunications secrecy. The Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the 2006 directive in 2014 and, on 6 October 2020, general retention of traffic and location data, while leaving room for IP-address retention and case-by-case freezes. Von Notz said “blanket, suspicionless data retention is dead”, even as the court opened that IP-address door.

The 2015 statute — four weeks for location data, ten for other traffic data — was never enforced. The Federal Network Agency suspended it, and on 20 September 2022 the Court of Justice held it contrary to EU law. Von Notz and Green legal spokesperson Helge Limburg said retention belonged “on the scrap heap of history” and that the coalition agreement left no legal or political room for a revival. SPD digital spokesperson Jens Zimmermann was more cautious. The FDP’s “quick freeze” would preserve data still held, on suspicion and a court order. The interior ministry called that impractical; Telekom said IP logs lasted about ten days. In November 2023 von Notz, a 2016 complainant with 17 other Greens, withdrew the Karlsruhe case. The Greens backed Justice Minister Marco Buschmann; Interior Minister Nancy Faeser still wanted suspicionless IP storage. On 10 April 2024 the cabinet chose quick freeze. Police objected that conduct preceding an offence could not be reconstructed once logs were gone. In December 2025 SPD Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig proposed three-month IP storage. The Greens and Die Linke, with data-protection groups and the internet industry, objected; a taz commentary argued that quick freeze cannot recover logs already deleted.

On 6 September 2013, after reports that the U.S. National Security Agency could defeat common encryption, von Notz called that a “meltdown of the rule of law” and said cooperating firms were helping to “break civil rights”. On 10 June 2021 a CDU/CSU–SPD majority of 355 to 280 extended source telecommunications surveillance — malware that reads end-to-end encryption on the device, including stored chats — to domestic intelligence, the Federal Intelligence Service and military counterintelligence, and gave the Federal Police a judicially authorised trojan. The opposition voted no. Von Notz called the tools half-baked and constitutionally precarious: the vulnerabilities would affect 82 million people and other services and criminals could use them, which was why German IT security was “so extremely modest”. An FDP deputy called it a “black day for civil rights”; Die Linke called the reform manifestly unconstitutional. The CDU said the police power targeted trafficking and smuggling. On 7 August 2025 the Constitutional Court voided that power for offences punishable by at most three years, limiting it to particularly serious crime, and left covert online searches partly unconstitutional pending a rewrite. Digitalcourage argued the software needs holes criminals can use too.

Cybersecurity and digital sovereignty

After the Nord Stream sabotage and suspected railway attacks, von Notz said in October 2022 that Germany had a serious security problem and that, in digital systems, security had “far too often been thought of last”. He compared Chinese equipment in 5G networks to reliance on Russian gas, called data retention a “sham solution”, and wanted a critical-infrastructure umbrella law, saying little had changed under Faeser.

On 13 November 2025 the Bundestag passed the NIS2 implementation act, covering an estimated 29,850 companies and the federal administration under the Federal Office for Information Security. CDU/CSU, SPD and AfD voted yes; the Greens voted no and Die Linke abstained. A Green motion, “Deutschland resilient machen”, asking for one statute for digital and physical protection, went to committee. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told von Notz the Greens had demanded for weeks that the bill be finished, and that the coalition was enacting NIS2 as “a strong element of cybersecurity” where the Greens had “simply not managed” to.

In April 2025, as the Bundesrat sought nationwide use of Palantir Technologies software already used by police in Bavaria, Hesse and Green-co-governed North Rhine-Westphalia, von Notz told taz the tools were “highly controversial” and legally risky. The Greens, he said, accepted automated analysis only if Karlsruhe would uphold it. In June, after the interior ministry said no federal decision was taken and that “digital sovereignty” would be weighed, he said a firm whose founder Peter Thiel was tied to U.S. technology circles around President Trump should not hold core police data, and asked Dobrindt to exclude Palantir, as Faeser had, for German or European systems.

Intelligence oversight

NSA and BND inquiry

On 20 March 2014 the Bundestag unanimously established the first committee of inquiry of the 18th electoral term (Drucksache 18/843) to investigate interception of telephone, email and internet traffic in Germany after disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about collection by the NSA and Britain's GCHQ, including the communications of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Konstantin von Notz was the full member and Obmann for Alliance 90/The Greens, not the chair; Hans-Christian Ströbele was the Greens' deputy. Clemens Binninger of the Christian Democratic Union was elected chair on 3 April 2014 and resigned on 9 April, saying the row over summoning Snowden showed that cooperation among all groups would not be possible. Patrick Sensburg (CDU/CSU) was named chair on 10 April. Von Notz called it "simply absurd" to blame the opposition and spoke of pressure from the Union leadership and the Chancellery.

On 8 May 2014 the committee voted unanimously to question Snowden, but only after the coalition split an opposition motion that would have required testimony in Germany. The Union and the Social Democratic Party preferred video so that he would not enter the country. Von Notz called the split a procedural trick. Snowden, in Moscow, was not heard.

In October 2014 NDR, WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, from material given to the committee, that from 2004 to 2008 the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) copied raw traffic at Frankfurt's DE-CIX and passed it to the NSA — the operation reported as Eikonal — and that a filter still missed at least five percent of German communications. The programme was described as ending in 2008 under then Chancellery chief Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Von Notz and Ströbele said such transfers would be a "solid scandal" and would falsify Merkel's claim that German law applied on German soil; the Chancellery had denied the practice to Ströbele that July.

The committee also sought the NSA selector lists — telephone numbers, email addresses and IP addresses supplied to the BND. The government refused, and a coalition majority instead had administrative judge Kurt Graulich review them. On 13 October 2016 the Federal Constitutional Court held, in proceedings brought by the Green and Left groups and their spokespersons (2 BvE 2/15), that Article 44 of the Basic Law covered the lists, but that United States secrecy interests prevailed: release without American consent would harm cooperation and foreign policy. Von Notz said years of unlawful BND practice would stay in the dark.

On 9 June 2016 the Bundestag widened the mandate to parts of the BND's strategic signals intelligence. On 28 June 2017 Sensburg gave President Norbert Lammert a report of about 1,800 pages (Drucksache 18/12850) and spoke of consensus alongside differing assessments; von Notz called the parliamentary inquiry unique in the world. Sensburg had removed von Notz and Martina Renner as rapporteurs after they withheld their signatures because the minority opinion was not to be published as submitted. That text is in the official report, with heavier redactions than the opposition's version. The coalition placed the failures at the BND; the opposition argued the evidence showed suspicionless mass surveillance, including of Germans, and failures in the Chancellery. Lammert said parliament should not depend on the government's own classification and proposed a binding arbiter. The opposition also criticised the BND Act in force from 31 December 2016 for still allowing political interception.

Parliamentary Control Panel

The Parliamentary Control Panel (Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium) supervises the BND, the Military Counterintelligence Service and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The government must brief it on the services' general work and on matters of particular importance, and the panel may demand further reports.

Von Notz has sat on the panel since the 19th Bundestag. On 18 January 2018 he was elected with 500 votes and, the same day, deputy chair under Armin Schuster (CDU), in a sitting led by President Wolfgang Schäuble.

On 24 March 2022 the House created a 13-member panel under Article 45d of the Basic Law. That day, under President Bärbel Bas, it elected von Notz chair and Roderich Kiesewetter deputy chair; the AfD and Left nominees fell short of a majority. On 26 June 2025 a nine-member panel (Drucksache 21/563), constituted under Vice-President Josephine Ortleb, elected Marc Henrichmann (CDU/CSU) chair and von Notz deputy chair. AfD and Left nominees again failed. A Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own information, describes him as deputy chair until 2021 and chair from 2021 to 2025. The text archive dates the chairmanship from 24 March 2022.

Later inquiries and surveillance debates

In the 19th term von Notz was a deputy member of the inquiry into the 2016 Berlin truck attack at Breitscheidplatz, set up on 1 March 2018. He noted that the federal committee, unlike inquiries in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia, could obtain federal-agency files, and called it a mystery how a known top-level threat had carried out the attack.

On 19 May 2020 the Federal Constitutional Court held that the 2016 powers to monitor foreigners' telecommunications abroad breached Article 10 and press freedom: basic rights bind German state power outside Germany, and independent control was underdeveloped. The rules could run only until 31 December 2021.

On 24 September 2026 the Bundestag debated wider operational powers. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) called the bills a new era, from collecting information to defending against attack. Chancellery Minister Nina Warken (CDU) said the BND could not stand idle against a serious threat others could not meet. Von Notz accepted more powers for the foreign service, citing daily Russian espionage and sabotage, but called domestic powers — data interception and covert entry into homes — a serious mistake and doubted they would survive in Karlsruhe. He told taz that copying them onto the inland service, including letting it alter data inside IT systems, was ill-considered and dangerous and belonged with the police, and that the draft broke the separation of intelligence and policing even though separated files had failed over Anis Amri and the National Socialist Underground. Clara Bünger of Die Linke warned of a new German secret police.

In October 2026, after a fire at a Starlink site in Poland that Warsaw treated as sabotage, he told the Schwäbische Zeitung that purely national action was no longer tolerable. Die Welt reported his proposal for a European arrangement he called "Euro-Eyes." Withheld lists, government-controlled classification and the 2020 finding of thin control were criticised as oversight that was too weak; the inquiry majority, and ministers in 2026, treated the legal limits as too tight.

Affiliations, publications and personal life

Boards and civil-society roles

Disclosures filed with the Bundestag list several unpaid roles alongside the mandate. Von Notz is a deputy member of the board of trustees of the Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung in Friedrichsruh, the federal foundation concerned with Otto von Bismarck; the foundation places him among the Kuratorium’s deputy members, and filings compiled by abgeordnetenwatch record the trusteeship as honorary for the Bundestag terms from 2017–2021 onward. A disclosure recorded on 9 May 2023 also lists him as a board member of the Deutsche Parlamentarische Gesellschaft.

On data protection, he sat on the advisory board of Deutsche Telekom until 31 December 2013, as published in the Bundestag biography for the 18th electoral term, and was an honorary member of the advisory board of the Stiftung Datenschutz in Leipzig until 3 February 2022. That biography also listed membership of Transparency International Deutschland, and the German chapter again described him as a member when noting his return to parliament in 2025.

He has taken symbolic human-rights sponsorships. In February 2013, under the Bundestag human-rights committee’s programme “Parlamentarier schützen Parlamentarier”, the then interior and internet-policy spokesman of Alliance 90/The Greens sponsored the Cuban physicist and blogger Antonio Rodiles, founder of the forum Estado de Sats. Rodiles had been arrested in Havana on 7 November 2012 after a protest over the detention of journalist Yaremis Flores; Amnesty International issued an urgent action, and he was freed after more than three weeks without formal charge, warned that continued activity could bring prosecution. Committee chair Tom Koenigs had pointed von Notz to the programme; von Notz linked the case to limits on speech and the internet in Cuba and to German exports of surveillance software. Through Libereco’s #WeStandBYyou campaign he later sponsored, on 21 December 2020, the Belarusian student Yan Salanovich, sentenced to 86 days of administrative detention after a peaceful rally in Minsk, and in 2021 the Viasna lawyer Leanid Sudalenka, detained in Homiel on 18 January 2021 and charged with organising actions that grossly violate public order.

Writings

His scholarly book is the dissertation Lebensführungspflichten im evangelischen Kirchenrecht, accepted at Heidelberg University in 2002 and published in 2003 by Peter Lang as volume 10 of Schriften zum Staatskirchenrecht (324 pages). It examines duties of personal conduct for Protestant church workers in public-law, private, and voluntary service, and how far those duties can be defined and enforced.

Later publication has been occasional. In 2014, in a series of the Protestant Academy of Baden at the University of Freiburg, he lectured on “Veränderungen des Menschenbildes durch die Maschinen? Der neue Umgang mit Informationen und Daten”; the academy’s friends’ association gave that lecture the Bad Herrenalber Akademiepreis for 2015. A 2020 conversation in Herder Korrespondenz linked data protection to what he called the Christian promise of freedom and discussed church labour law, the church tax, and the churches during the coronavirus pandemic.

Family and private life

Bundestag biographies state that he is married and has two children, without naming the children. Author notes in Die Welt on 31 March and 17 November 2020 identified his wife as the constitutional lawyer Dr Anna von Notz, then an editor of the Verfassungsblog. On 9 November 2021 the synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany elected her, a constitutional lawyer born in 1984, to the church’s Council as a new member. The EKD lists her as a Council member, records earlier work as a research assistant at the Federal Constitutional Court and as a Verfassungsblog editor, and gives her current occupation as judge and member of that site’s editorial board.

The EKD lists von Notz as a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Northern Germany. In a 2019 interview with the Evangelischer Pressedienst he said he had become a devout Protestant through Protestant youth work. In the 2020 Herder Korrespondenz conversation he called himself a believing person.