The top US&nbsp;intelligence official has ordered tighter restrictions on how the names of Americans kept secret in intelligence reports can be revealed during presidential transitions, according to documents seen by Reuters.

The move follows unsubstantiated charges by President Donald Trump and his allies that his predecessor&#39;s administration spied on Trump and improperly &quot;unmasked&quot; the identities of his associates during the 2016 presidential campaign and transition.

Current and former senior US Intelligence officials who have reviewed the documentation dispute those claims by the president.&nbsp;

In September, the US&nbsp;Justice Department said in a court filing that it had no evidence to support the president&#39;s claim that President Barack Obama ordered surveillance of his Trump Tower campaign headquarters.&nbsp;

In a November 30 letter sent to Representative Devin Nunes, Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and other top lawmakers, the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said the new unmasking policy is due by January 15.

Nunes was among the first to charge that US&nbsp;intelligence agencies collected information on Americans involved in Trump&#39;s transition team. A Nunes spokesman declined comment.

Coats wrote that the new policy will reinforce existing procedures that &quot;make clear that IC (intelligence community) elements may not engage in political activity, including dissemination of US&nbsp;person identities to the White House, for the purpose of affecting the political process of the United States.&quot;

&quot;In addition, this policy will require heightened levels of approval for requests made during a Presidential transition when those requests relate to known members of a President-elect&#39;s transition team,&quot; Coats wrote in the letter, which was sent to the top Republicans and Democrats on the Intelligence and Judiciary committees in both the House and Senate.

A spokesman for Coats had no comment.&nbsp;

Reuters has also reviewed a draft presidential order that, if enacted, would make similar changes to unmasking procedures that relate to presidential transitions.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the four-page draft presidential order, which is undated. It is unclear if Trump will sign the document in addition to the new policies Coats has ordered.&nbsp;

US&nbsp;intelligence agencies are barred from eavesdropping on Americans&#39;&nbsp;communications without warrants. However, information involving US&nbsp;citizens sometimes is incidentally collected in the monitoring of foreign intelligence targets. In such cases, the Americans&#39;&nbsp;identities are anonymized with labels such as &quot;U.S. Person No. 1.&quot;

&quot;Unmasking&quot; occurs when an authorized US&nbsp;policymaker requests the name of an American to help understand the value of the foreign intelligence. A policymaker also can request an unmasking when the information concerns a crime.

Unmasking requests already are subjected to extensive reviews by multiple officials before they are approved.

For unmasking requests made between a US&nbsp;presidential election and Inauguration Day, the draft presidential order states, the request now would have to say whether the official making it believed or knew it involved a member of the president-elect&#39;s transition team.

Moreover, if the request is approved, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees would have to be informed.

A request also would have to be approved by the top lawyer of the US&nbsp;intelligence agency that disseminated the original intelligence report.

While Coats, in his letter, said the new policies are intended to keep politics out of intelligence issues, some current and former officials said the draft presidential order could do the opposite.

&quot;If this executive order is implemented as written, or worse if it&#39;s written into law, it is not only an infringement on the political independence of the intelligence community, but it will endanger our ability to work with our allies, who may fear we&#39;ve been drafted into a political party,&quot; said one US&nbsp;official familiar with the issue, speaking on condition of anonymity.

It appears that the Trump administration is trying to streamline, systematize, and memorialize the unmasking process, said Christopher Swift, a Georgetown University law professor and partner at Foley &amp; Lardner LLP.

&quot;But these same procedures might also be used to identify pending national security investigations and insert the White House into these decisions,&quot; Swift said via email.

The top US intelligence official has ordered tighter restrictions on how the names of Americans kept secret in intelligence reports can be revealed during presidential transitions, according to documents seen by Reuters

The top US intelligence official has ordered tighter restrictions on how the names of Americans kept secret in intelligence reports can be revealed during presidential transitions, according to documents seen by Reuters. The move follows unsubstantiated charges by President Donald Trump and his allies that his predecessor's administration spied on Trump and improperly "unmasked" the identities of his associates during the 2016 presidential campaign and transition. Current and former senior US Intelligence officials who have reviewed the documentation dispute those claims by the president. In September, the US Justice Department said in a court filing that it had no evidence to support the president's claim that President Barack Obama ordered surveillance of his Trump Tower campaign headquarters. In a November 30 letter sent to Representative Devin Nunes, Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and other top lawmakers, the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said the new unmasking policy is due by January 15. Nunes was among the first to charge that US intelligence agencies collected information on Americans involved in Trump's transition team. A Nunes spokesman declined comment. Coats wrote that the new policy will reinforce existing procedures that "make clear that IC (intelligence community) elements may not engage in political activity, including dissemination of US person identities to the White House, for the purpose of affecting the political process of the United States." "In addition, this policy will require heightened levels of approval for requests made during a Presidential transition when those requests relate to known members of a President-elect's transition team," Coats wrote in the letter, which was sent to the top Republicans and Democrats on the Intelligence and Judiciary committees in both the House and Senate. A spokesman for Coats had no comment. Reuters has also reviewed a draft presidential order that, if enacted, would make similar changes to unmasking procedures that relate to presidential transitions. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the four-page draft presidential order, which is undated. It is unclear if Trump will sign the document in addition to the new policies Coats has ordered. US intelligence agencies are barred from eavesdropping on Americans' communications without warrants. However, information involving US citizens sometimes is incidentally collected in the monitoring of foreign intelligence targets. In such cases, the Americans' identities are anonymized with labels such as "U.S. Person No. 1." "Unmasking" occurs when an authorized US policymaker requests the name of an American to help understand the value of the foreign intelligence. A policymaker also can request an unmasking when the information concerns a crime. Unmasking requests already are subjected to extensive reviews by multiple officials before they are approved. For unmasking requests made between a US presidential election and Inauguration Day, the draft presidential order states, the request now would have to say whether the official making it believed or knew it involved a member of the president-elect's transition team. Moreover, if the request is approved, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees would have to be informed. A request also would have to be approved by the top lawyer of the US intelligence agency that disseminated the original intelligence report. While Coats, in his letter, said the new policies are intended to keep politics out of intelligence issues, some current and former officials said the draft presidential order could do the opposite. "If this executive order is implemented as written, or worse if it's written into law, it is not only an infringement on the political independence of the intelligence community, but it will endanger our ability to work with our allies, who may fear we've been drafted into a political party," said one US official familiar with the issue, speaking on condition of anonymity. It appears that the Trump administration is trying to streamline, systematize, and memorialize the unmasking process, said Christopher Swift, a Georgetown University law professor and partner at Foley & Lardner LLP. "But these same procedures might also be used to identify pending national security investigations and insert the White House into these decisions," Swift said via email.

US spy chief orders changes in 'unmasking' policy

Sheep are surprisingly smart. New research from the University of Cambridge shows the animals can learn to recognise people from photographs, even people they&rsquo;ve never seen in real life, such as celebrities.

The researchers tested the sheeps&rsquo; recognition abilities using images of famous people including Barack Obama, actors Emma Watson and Jake Gyllenhaal, and UK newsreader Fiona Bruce. While this is an amusing way to demonstrate what sheep can do, the research could actually have serious uses.

For one thing, increasing our understanding of sheep&rsquo;s perceptual abilities could be used to argue for improved animal welfare. But sheep are also being used as models for understanding brain disorders such as Huntingdon&rsquo;s disease and Parkinson&rsquo;s disease, along with psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. So, learning more about their cognitive capacities could aid the work in this field.

In 2001, the Cambridge team showed that sheep could discriminate between photos of familiar sheep and humans and respond to the emotions portrayed in these photos. But they wanted to see whether sheep could actually recognise the people rather than just memorise familiar photos.

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They used a computer screen to show eight Welsh mountain sheep the celebrity pictures and then used food rewards to train the animals to select these familiar faces from a wider selection of pictures of other people and objects. The sheep could recognise the celebrities even though they had never met them personally and had only been introduced to a face-on photo. Incidentally, the sheep didn&rsquo;t appear to have a preference for Emma, Barack, Fiona or Jake.

To see if the sheep were actually recognising people, rather than just memorising certain images, the researchers showed them photos of the celebrities taken from different angles. The sheep were able to correctly identify the celebrity 80 per cent of the time, dropping to 66 per cent for photos taken at a different angle. This compares to rates of 90 per cent and 76 per cent in humans.

This is an enviable record for the sheep given that they are recognising the faces of another species. (How many humans could recognise different sheep from their photos?) This sound scientific set-up was also able to time the sheep&rsquo;s responses, showing they appeared as confident whether looking at the face in the same position as the original photo or from a different angle.

There was one final surprise for the sheep. After proving they could recognise faces of people they&rsquo;d never met from two-dimensional photos, the sheep were shown pictures of their regular human handler. Although they hadn&rsquo;t been trained to recognise these images, they selected them over the unfamiliar photos anyway.

Smart sheep

I was asked if, as an Ig Nobel laureate myself, I thought this recent Cambridge sheep study would be a contender for an Ig Nobel award, the prize for science that &ldquo;first makes you laugh, then makes you think&rdquo;. Celebrity-spotting sheep might sound funny but the science involved in this study actually isn&rsquo;t sniggerable.

First, it makes an interesting contribution to animal science, showing sheep have much greater cognitive abilities than many people realise. This includes farmers, who often manage hundreds of animals with little actual contact, in the presence of dogs and during unpleasant experiences such as worming or shearing. This means sheep are usually at their least composed around humans, without the inclination to show off their impressive cognitive capacities.

My own work and that of colleagues in Scotland has found that ewes can identify pain in their lambs who have undergone tail docking or castration. Another recent study demonstrated that it is possible that sheep have a sense of self and can recognise themselves in a mirror &ndash; something we only know is possible in very few species, including chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants and magpies.

Learning more about sheep&rsquo;s cognitive abilities could also feed into work on using their brains to study neurological conditions in humans. We know that the neural networks that sheep&rsquo;s brains use for face perception are similar to those used by human brains. That means that we might be able to use sheep to test treatments for human diseases where patients lose the ability to recognise faces or emotions, such as Huntington&rsquo;s disease.

If sheep were on the Ig Nobel judging panel, they would laugh at the idea that people are surprised at their abilities. (And we know that animals really can laugh. And they might also be interested to know that Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded for studies showing many human identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually. Or that humans with an itch on the left side of their body, can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching their right side. This research suggests that actually, humans aren&rsquo;t as good at visual recognition as we perhaps think.

This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" rel="nofollow" target="blank">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/sheep-can-recognise-celebrities-from-photographs-says-amusing-study-with-serious-potential-87032" rel="nofollow" target="blank">original article</a>.

Image Credit:&nbsp;Shutterstock

It's no surprise sheep can recognise people ? their intelligence is often overlooked

Sheep are surprisingly smart. New research from the University of Cambridge shows the animals can learn to recognise people from photographs, even people they’ve never seen in real life, such as celebrities. The researchers tested the sheeps’ recognition abilities using images of famous people including Barack Obama, actors Emma Watson and Jake Gyllenhaal, and UK newsreader Fiona Bruce. While this is an amusing way to demonstrate what sheep can do, the research could actually have serious uses. For one thing, increasing our understanding of sheep’s perceptual abilities could be used to argue for improved animal welfare. But sheep are also being used as models for understanding brain disorders such as Huntingdon’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, along with psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. So, learning more about their cognitive capacities could aid the work in this field. In 2001, the Cambridge team showed that sheep could discriminate between photos of familiar sheep and humans and respond to the emotions portrayed in these photos. But they wanted to see whether sheep could actually recognise the people rather than just memorise familiar photos. × They used a computer screen to show eight Welsh mountain sheep the celebrity pictures and then used food rewards to train the animals to select these familiar faces from a wider selection of pictures of other people and objects. The sheep could recognise the celebrities even though they had never met them personally and had only been introduced to a face-on photo. Incidentally, the sheep didn’t appear to have a preference for Emma, Barack, Fiona or Jake. To see if the sheep were actually recognising people, rather than just memorising certain images, the researchers showed them photos of the celebrities taken from different angles. The sheep were able to correctly identify the celebrity 80 per cent of the time, dropping to 66 per cent for photos taken at a different angle. This compares to rates of 90 per cent and 76 per cent in humans. This is an enviable record for the sheep given that they are recognising the faces of another species. (How many humans could recognise different sheep from their photos?) This sound scientific set-up was also able to time the sheep’s responses, showing they appeared as confident whether looking at the face in the same position as the original photo or from a different angle. There was one final surprise for the sheep. After proving they could recognise faces of people they’d never met from two-dimensional photos, the sheep were shown pictures of their regular human handler. Although they hadn’t been trained to recognise these images, they selected them over the unfamiliar photos anyway. Smart sheep I was asked if, as an Ig Nobel laureate myself, I thought this recent Cambridge sheep study would be a contender for an Ig Nobel award, the prize for science that “first makes you laugh, then makes you think”. Celebrity-spotting sheep might sound funny but the science involved in this study actually isn’t sniggerable. First, it makes an interesting contribution to animal science, showing sheep have much greater cognitive abilities than many people realise. This includes farmers, who often manage hundreds of animals with little actual contact, in the presence of dogs and during unpleasant experiences such as worming or shearing. This means sheep are usually at their least composed around humans, without the inclination to show off their impressive cognitive capacities. My own work and that of colleagues in Scotland has found that ewes can identify pain in their lambs who have undergone tail docking or castration. Another recent study demonstrated that it is possible that sheep have a sense of self and can recognise themselves in a mirror – something we only know is possible in very few species, including chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants and magpies. Learning more about sheep’s cognitive abilities could also feed into work on using their brains to study neurological conditions in humans. We know that the neural networks that sheep’s brains use for face perception are similar to those used by human brains. That means that we might be able to use sheep to test treatments for human diseases where patients lose the ability to recognise faces or emotions, such as Huntington’s disease. If sheep were on the Ig Nobel judging panel, they would laugh at the idea that people are surprised at their abilities. (And we know that animals really can laugh. And they might also be interested to know that Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded for studies showing many human identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually. Or that humans with an itch on the left side of their body, can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching their right side. This research suggests that actually, humans aren’t as good at visual recognition as we perhaps think. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Image Credit: Shutterstock

Sheep can recognise celebrities from photographs

Nepal prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal on Friday reiterated readiness to participate in China&#39;s ambitious &quot;One Belt, One Road&quot; initiative, saying his country wanted to be benefited from the endeavour.&nbsp;

The prime minister, at his meeting with the Chinese minister of state administration for industry and commerce Zhang Mao, expressed confidence that the development project could benefit the land-locked country.

The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road initiatives are aimed at building a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa, along the ancient trade routes of Silk Road.

The prime minister assured their active participation in Chinese President Xi Jinping&#39;s pet projects. &quot;Relationship between Nepal and China has remained trouble-free for ages and needs to be further strengthened. I believe that frequent exchanges of high-level visits help to enhance our ties,&quot; foreign relations advisor to the Prime Minister Rishi Raj Adhikari quoted Dahal.&nbsp;

The visiting Chinese minister lauded the conducive environment for Chinese companies and the timely implementation of Nepal-China joint projects. With nearly three billion people inhabiting areas covered by the proposed economic belt, it represents the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.

(WION with inputs from agencies) 
&nbsp;

Intelligence sub inspector Akbar Ali was waiting at a bus stop near his home in Charsadda district when the gunmen opened fire

Nepal prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal on Friday reiterated readiness to participate in China's ambitious "One Belt, One Road" initiative, saying his country wanted to be benefited from the endeavour. The prime minister, at his meeting with the Chinese minister of state administration for industry and commerce Zhang Mao, expressed confidence that the development project could benefit the land-locked country. The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road initiatives are aimed at building a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa, along the ancient trade routes of Silk Road. The prime minister assured their active participation in Chinese President Xi Jinping's pet projects. "Relationship between Nepal and China has remained trouble-free for ages and needs to be further strengthened. I believe that frequent exchanges of high-level visits help to enhance our ties," foreign relations advisor to the Prime Minister Rishi Raj Adhikari quoted Dahal. The visiting Chinese minister lauded the conducive environment for Chinese companies and the timely implementation of Nepal-China joint projects. With nearly three billion people inhabiting areas covered by the proposed economic belt, it represents the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential. (WION with inputs from agencies)

Islamic State gunmen kill Pakistani intelligence official

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