ALL THESE PEOPLE I know who would normally go to Burning Man decided to go to the Republican National Convention instead. Well, almost all of them. So I kept getting these demented updates from New York in the days before the RNC via various wireless devices – "Here's live footage of police brutality streaming from my Zaurus!" Then, four minutes later, I'd get an urgent e-mail from somebody on this list of Burners where I lurk. "Shit!" the e-mail would typically begin. "We need a propane tank RIGHT NOW! And a big trailer!"

Sometimes I fantasized the Burning Man missives were actually coming from the RNC. And then I imagined they weren't being authored by my smarty-pants radical friends who want to do constructive things like blog about the demise of liberalism and the danger of e-voting. Instead, I pictured all the disenfranchised file-sharers who just got arrested in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's massive peer-to-peer sting operation – absurdly known as Operation Digital Gridlock – taking up torches, storming the RNC, and demanding justice.

I mean, for fuck's sake, these people are being threatened with jail time for sharing movies online! They weren't beating and cornholing Iraqi prisoners. They weren't running people over while driving in a drunken stupor and then zooming off into the night. Instead they're facing up to five years in jail for giving away a few copies of Finding Nemo on a P2P network. Is this what our country has come to?

Yup. Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the feds have been busy keeping us safe from digital copyright infringement by conducting a massive, nationwide surveillance operation on members of a P2P community called the Underground Network (a suspiciously fake-sounding name if I ever heard one). Last week the super-cybersnooping came to a head with a series of arrests and the seizure of dangerous items like networked computers, pirated games, and other sorts of things ordinary geeks have lying around their living rooms.

Ashcroft and co. also announced they're starting another large-scale cybercriminal investigation, this one focusing on spammers. One group they're targeting is phishers, people who send out spam that lures victims into giving them personal information. Phishers are the ones who send spams that say, "Your account has been canceled. Please sign up again." A link in the e-mail leads you to a Web site made to look like your bank's or whatever, with a spot to enter your financial data. People are routinely swindled out of thousands of dollars by falling for the old "gimme all your personal data" trick.

Maybe I just have my priorities all mixed up, but doesn't the anti-phishing investigation seem more important and more, well, criminally oriented than Operation Digital Gridlock? I mean, scamming money out of eBay users may be entertaining, but I'm 100 percent behind the idea of sending jerk-offs who do it to jail.

In any case, Ashcroft couldn't even let the spam thing be his one sterling moment as an attorney general who's targeting actual crimes, rather than ideologies. Apparently Operation Spamtastic or whatever stupid name they've given it is also going to target "pornography." Um, hello? Pornography isn't illegal. Nor is it spam (of course there's porn spam, but that's not what Ashcroft says he and the feds targeting). So basically this is yet another way the government is trying to convince us that pornography is illegal. Somehow I have a feeling the heavies involved in Operation Digital Buttmuffin aren't going to be arresting the zillions of people who are infringing the copyrights of pornographers by putting Jenna Jameson's latest DVD on BitTorrent.

In this time of national turmoil and post-RNC barfiness, I think it's important to remember what really makes us happy. Turns out, according to an academic study conducted in Australia, that it's pornography. The government-funded project authored by three professors is called "Understanding Pornography in Australia," and it reveals that most people find porn makes them feel better about themselves and more attentive to their partners' needs. One author of the study, Dr. Alan McKee from Queensland University of Technology and Creative Industries, said only 6.9 percent of people surveyed felt pornography had had a negative impact on their lives. The majority, 58 percent, said it had a "positive effect on their attitudes towards sexuality."

Well, there you have it. To quote Ricky from my favorite TV show, Trailer Park Boys, "Defense rests. Everybody can go fuck off."

Annalee Newitz (goodporn@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who hopes the people who film orgies at the RNC will put them on P2P networks so we can all share. Her column also appears in Metro, Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper.