China Blocked Access to White House News Conference With Xi, Reporter Says

Zhao Yan, a Chinese journalist and dissident living in New York, said on Friday that he was prevented by Chinese officials from entering a room at the White House for a news conference on Tuesday with President Obama and the likely future leader of China, Xi Jinping.

In an interview with The Lede, Mr. Zhao said he had been granted access by the White House to cover the event for Boxun.com, a Chinese-language news site based in the United States. But once inside, he said, officials from China’s delegation identified him and asked that he be barred from the room where the two leaders were delivering prepared remarks.

Mr. Zhao said through an interpreter that he wanted to ask Mr. Xi whether he would do more to support human rights in China than his predecessors have.

The White House disputed his account, saying that the incident was the result of a miscommunication and that Mr. Zhao was simply not among the limited number of American and Chinese pool reporters approved for the small event. He had been granted entry into the White House only for the daily briefing, later that afternoon.

In 2005, Mr. Zhao, then a researcher for The New York Times in its Beijing bureau, was jailed in China as part of an investigation into the sources used for a Times article about the Chinese leadership. He was acquitted of the main charge of revealing state secrets, but spent three years in jail on unrelated charges and subsequently left China for the United States.

At the later press briefing with the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, he posed his question and it appeared as part of the transcript published on the White House site:

Q I’m a political journalist and political analyst from China. I have been here for two and a half years, and I have always seen the American government, the Obama government, place much more importance on the appreciation of the renminbi.

MR. CARNEY: On the appreciation of the renminbi?

Q Yes, place much more importance on the appreciation of the renminbi. Our readers are very concerned whether the U.S. government is much less interested in the human rights situation in China. And our readers are also interested to know whether the U.S. government will center on the human rights issue and policy between Middle East region and China. Can you talk to our readers about these two issues?

MR. CARNEY: Well, I would simply say that we have, in our relationship with the People’s Republic of China, a whole host of issues, as I was saying before. And we always raise human rights concerns at the highest levels when we have meetings with senior members of the Chinese leadership, and we will continue to do that. It is simply not the case that we emphasize one aspect of our relationship over the other. They are all important — both the areas where we agree, and the areas where we disagree. And we certainly express ourselves openly when we have concerns about human rights issues, as we do in this case.

President Obama is very aware of that issue, as is Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton and others.

Mr. Zhao provided an e-mail chain between himself and the White House press office that documented his application to cover the event and its approval. “All set, thanks!” read the last message, signed, “The White House Press Team.”

Mr. Zhao captured video on his iPhone in which a White House press officer can be heard telling him that he would only be allowed to cover the later press briefing. “There are very strict numbers for this,” the man can be heard saying.

The editor of Boxun, an independent news site run out of North Carolina, confirmed that Mr. Zhao had gone to the White House as its representative. He said that if Mr. Zhao was in fact stopped, it could have been because of his association with the site or his own history of dissident activities. “If the person there recognized him as he says, it’s likely he was blocked for himself,” the editor, who goes by the pseudonym Wei Shi, said in a telephone interview. “He has a face that is recognized.”

Mr. Zhao said on Friday that if he had been allowed into the room with Mr. Xi, and had not been formally allowed to ask a question, “I would have stood up anyway and asked.”

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Access to Google Sites Returns in Iran, as Mysteriously as It Disappeared

#Iran Strangles the #Internet Ahead of Elections zite.to/yDyfLD

— Amin Sabeti (@aminsabeti) February 14, 2012

After a disruption of access in Iran to Google’s e-mail services and other international Web sites starting last Thursday, access appeared to be restored on Monday, raising questions about whether it was a censorship test by the government for coming elections or an effort to quell possible street protests.

It was a year ago on Feb. 14 that the Green movement leaders Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi were placed under house arrest for contesting the results of the disputed 2009 presidential vote. Observers of Iran questioned whether the recent disruption may have been an effort to restrict encrypted communication before the parliamentary elections on March 2, prevent demonstrations on behalf of the imprisoned leaders or perhaps conduct a test for a widely anticipated government-run internet.

Since Iranians turned to social networks and the streets during the disputed election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, the government has blocked access to YouTube.com and other sites. Over the last two years, people have reported that Twitter and Facebook and other major social networks have also been largely inaccessible, according to data collected by Herdict.org, a project by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard that examines access to the Internet around the world.

The recent disruption affected international sites using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, which displays addresses beginning with HTTPS, allowing users the ability to send and search encrypted messages and avoid government scrutiny.

“Last fall Google switched to encrypted search by default, and the situation in Iran might represent a focus on restricting encrypted traffic — information that’s more difficult for the government to eavesdrop upon,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center.

Twitter and Facebook have moved in the last year toward using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol to increase security for their users.

Since the Iranian government has not assumed responsibility for the outage, Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said it was impossible to say precisely what was behind it. He said Iranian leaders had spoken in recent months about creating a “clean internet, safe for the moral values they hold.”

“They want to nationalize the internet,” said Mr. Deibert, who is also one of the principals behind the Open Net Initiative. “This may have been a test to prepare the groundwork.”

Many people in Iran are able to get around government blockages, however, using proxies and VPN.

Amin Sabeti, a blogger and researcher who writes about Iran from Britain, said the Iranian government wanted to create its own version of the internet because it viewed the Internet as an enemy. He said that government leaders began to attack Google more aggressively two or three months ago, claiming it was “a spy tool.”

“Today, one of the members of Iran’s Internet filtering council said Google is using SSL and we cannot monitor it, therefore we’ve blocked Gmail and Google’s services,” Mr. Sabeti said.

On Global Voices, the international blogging platform, some bloggers said they suspected the disruption was aimed at limiting communication in the weeks ahead of the election and among people supportive of the Green movement. “This blocking can be considered as the regime’s attempt to stop Green activists from informing people to take part in demonstrations in the final days of February,” said a writer for the blog, Azadi-Esteqlal-Edalat.

Iran’s Ministry of Communications and Technology has denied knowing of the disruption, saying the origin was elsewhere.

“Everything is up now and running as normal,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager of Renesys, a New Hampshire-based company that analyzes global Internet traffic.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 15, 2012

An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of Ronald Deibert.

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ACCESS TO SAFE CONTRACEPTIVES IS ONE WAY TO CURB ABORTION

For nearly four decades, advocates for reproductive rights have been stuck fighting an ugly, expensive and sometimes dangerous campaign to ensure that women have access to safe and legal abortions. It's a Groundhog's Day sort of battle in which both proponents for choice and the opposing camp -- rigid anti-abortionists -- trot out the same arguments over and over, with neither side persuading the other.

It's also a largely unnecessary battle that I once thought would be relegated to the footnotes of history by the early 21st century. That's because medical science long ago provided a solution to the problem of unplanned pregnancies: safe and easy-to-use contraception.

But the last couple of weeks have reminded me how wrong I was. Even as Planned Parenthood was showing its resilience, a new battle broke out in the same fraught territory: Should the Affordable Care Act require religious employers to upgrade their health insurance plans to provide free contraceptives?

Rolling out regulations for the new health care law, the Obama administration answered with a clear "yes." Its policy exempts churches, but would cover large Catholic-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and universities. You know by now that the rule ignited a firestorm of opposition from Catholic bishops, who, based on Vatican teachings, oppose any birth control methods beyond abstinence.

They contend that the policy represents a gross violation of their First Amendment rights to exercise their religious beliefs freely; Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, many of whom have pledged to battle the Affordable Health Care Act to an early grave, quickly joined in. The White House has also been criticized by a few Democrats, including former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a Catholic currently running for the U.S. Senate.

Their objections are not to be taken lightly. Religious freedom is a cornerstone of this great democracy, one of the founding principles that separate us from much of the world.

But religious freedom, like the others granted by the Bill of Rights, is not absolute. Child welfare authorities, for example, have intervened on behalf of minor children with serious illnesses whose parents have religious objections to medical care, and courts have often ruled that those children be treated.

Besides, 28 states already have similar measures that require insurers to offer contraception, and Catholic institutions operate in those states. Those rules sometimes caused controversy, as Michelle Goldberg notes at The Daily Beast, quoting Cardinal Edward Egan's opposition to the New York law, passed in 2002.

"We will not be daunted by the abortion and contraception extremists whose aggressive agenda includes putting the Catholic Church out of the business of providing health care and social services throughout the state of New York," Egan said.

Yet, federal courts upheld the law, and Catholic institutions still flourish throughout New York state. They have found a way to abide by laws meant to support a broader societal goal, whether ending gender discrimination or expanding health care.

Obama has signaled a willingness to look for a compromise that may satisfy the U.S. Conference of Bishops, and I hope he does so -- so long as he doesn't gut the protections offered under the new health care law. This rule doesn't go into effect for organizations affiliated with religious groups until 2013, so there is plenty of time for reasonable people to seek ways to protect religious freedom while also expanding access to contraceptives.

But the bishops may not want any compromise. If they don't, Obama should proceed with the new rule.

About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which promotes reproductive health. About 40 percent of those end in abortion. If you want to curb abortion, then you have to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies. It's simple enough.

For those of us who have grown weary of the abortion wars, broad contraceptive use -- encouraged by the Affordable Care Act -- offers a rational way to turn down the temperature on a difficult and divisive issue. Since a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute shows a majority of Catholics approve of Obama's rule, I'll bet many of them agree.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

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