News you may have missed #571 [updated]

Markus Wolf

►►East German spymaster’s widow loses pension battle. Andrea Wolf, The widow of Markus Wolf, the shadowy spymaster of communist East Germany, lost a court battle on Monday to reclaim his honorary pension. Dubbed “The Man Without a Face” because Western intelligence services long lacked even a photograph of him, Wolf directed the General Intelligence Administration, the foreign intelligence division of East Germany’s Stasi. He died in 2006, at the age of 83.
►►Dominica government officials deny spying accusations. Dominican officials have strongly denied accusations that the government of the former British colony, through the National Joint Intelligence Committee (NJIC), has been spying on the activities and actions of political activists over the last few months. According to the allegations, in one case, in April 2009, a member of the Dominica Police Force was sent to Brooklyn, New York, to spy on a conference on the political situation in Dominica, on orders from the country’s Prime Minister. But Dominica’s Police Commissioner, Cyril Carrette, denied the existence of NJIC, and called the accusations unfounded.
►►British spy agency called in to crack BlackBerry encryption. The British intelligence service, MI5, has been drafted in to assist its sister service, GCHQ, in cracking the BlackBerry encryption code, in order to find those responsible for Read more of this post