U.S. tried to force Chelsea Clinton Fan Club Web site to close

Adam Clayton Powell IIIWorld Center

08.10.98

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The federal government tried to force a Canadian Web site devoted to a Chelsea Clinton Fan Club to close, according to a report in The Washington Post Aug. 8.

Under the headline "Internet Is Strangely Silent About Clintons' Daughter," the story described an unusual lack of content about the first daughter on the Web, which is full of unofficial fan club sites for the famous, the near-famous and the obscure.

The reason for the lack of information was not lack of interest, according to the story: The Post documented one case of a U.S. government effort to force the Chelsea Clinton Fan Club in Canada to close its Web site.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, acting at the request of the U.S. Secret Service, approached Peter Clipsham, a college student who ran the site and who claimed 10,000 members of the fan club.

According to the Post, the police told Clipsham he must either close his site or answer questions and turn over his list of club members. Clipsham said he refused to close the site or turn over his membership list, but he did answer their questions.

A short time later, the site closed. Clipsham said he simply did not have time to maintain it, and he denied he shut down because of police pressure.

"I don't think I was frightened," he told the Post. "I hadn't done anything wrong."

Both the U.S. and Canadian governments refused to discuss the case, according to the Post.

But other Web sites devoted to Chelsea Clinton have also closed quietly over the past several months.

A Yahoo search on Chelsea Clinton surfaced just two sites. One, The Definitive Chelsea Clinton Page, has been reduced to a single page with a plaintive message from Webmaster Christopher Short:

"the definitive chelsea clinton page, like all its predecessors, is gone. when all the others folded, they took with them all the information i had on chelsea. lamentably, this left me with nothing but an amalgamation of lame links -- "definitive" in name only. so, i've pulled the plug. someone who knows something about chelsea, PLEASE carry the torch -- i can't. yours, christ short" But the co-creator of the other Chelsea site found by Yahoo, Chelsea Clinton's Top Ten White House Complaints, said he was unaware of any government interference.

"We have not had any problems regarding our lists on Chelsea Clinton," said Christian Shelton, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Shelton told free! he was unaware of other sites having difficulties until he was contacted by The Washington Post. And he said his Chelsea Clinton site was completely innocuous.

"Our lists are not based on any details about the first daughter's life other than broad facts like she lived in the White House and she attends Stanford," Shelton said, "and we hope that they are not taken as anything other than good-natured fun by Ms. Clinton or anyone else."

Editors at many mainstream media have agreed not to publish news of the president's daughter.

Seth Effron, executive editor of Nando.net, even posted an explanation of his refusal to publish reports by wire services and other news organizations naming Chelsea's boyfriend, calling such reports "an inappropriate invasion of ... the young man's privacy, his family's privacy and Chelsea Clinton's privacy as a college student."

And the student newspaper at Stanford University, where the president's daughter is an undergraduate, publicly promised not to report on Chelsea Clinton, perhaps the most famous student on campus.

In contrast, on the Internet, one would expect to find less-proscribed discussion, debate and just plain entertainment.

"[G]iven the demographics of World Wide Web users, we don't think it is surprising that a nationally known female college student would attract some attention on the Web," Shelton told free!

But, on the contrary, whether through government efforts or not, the Chelsea Clinton Fan Clubs have all disappeared, and the Web pickings have become surprisingly slim.

An AltaVista search found a few simple lists, such as The Top 16 Chelsea Clinton Pet Peeves About College, a parody site on Chelsea's boyfriends, a biographical site maintained by the Voice of America's Croatian service, various tasteless-joke sites and the inevitable "Chelsea Clinton Naked" site.

free! did not ascertain whether there were in fact any images of the president's daughter posted there, with or without clothes.