I had mixed feelings when I found out the government was spying on me.

I already had detected that same combination of emotions in a friend of mine who is a couple of shades to the left of me on the political spectrum. Let's just say his name is Cal, though the government already bloody well knows his real name. Military investigators recently called up his on-again/off-again girlfriend to ask, among other things, whether his name is Arabic (Kha'al?).

Cal doesn't even air his views very publicly except on an e-mail discussion group to which he and I both belong. So has someone been listening in on that? And how would investigators have known about Cal's girlfriend? They must have been tapping his phone, Cal told me. And he smiled – pleased, I think, that a lot of his paranoia had been validated.

But there's also some accidental pleasure in having people in authority actually seek out your opinion.

This brings me to the subject of my Web site. It floats in cyberspace at www.barrylank.com, bearing all the columns I've written in the last two years. Every four weeks or so, I look at how many people visited the site and which of the site's pages were the most popular. This week I found out that, between Nov. 15 and Dec. 15, two columns were viewed with ridiculous frequency, each getting nearly seven times the number of hits than the next most popular article.

These top two columns were the last two I published before Sept. 11.

In Sept. 9, I wrote about Philadelphia's Fringe Festival of alternative theater. The article is more than three months old and I'm not sure why anybody would read it now. But someone did – 406 times in the last month.

On Sept. 2, I wrote about outdoor security cameras in Jersey City. I worked for awhile as a security guard, and my not-too-profound point in the column was that watching those camera monitors must have been the most boring job above the level of amoeba. The column happened to touch upon security concerns, however, and certain people looked at it 409 times.

(The third most popular column, by the way, got only 61 hits – a normal amount. It's something I wrote last May about people who are sexually attracted to sneezing. I am informed that this article has been making the rounds in the online fetish community.)

On the one hand, this all seems pretty logical. If I were investigating terrorists, I would want to know everything anybody said just before Sept. 11, especially if it included mention of video surveillance.

But it's unnerving to think that authorities took these columns (not my best work, frankly) and ran them through some obscure decoding device, searching for their darkest possible meanings. Are officials also investigating my clumsy personal life? The strange places I visit on the Internet? All the things I've written that were supposed to be funny but, in the harsh light of an interrogation room, may not get the laughs I expect?

Weirdly, however, it also actually is nice to be noticed.

I once heard that, during the Cold War, Soviet dissident writers felt let-down after escaping to the open dialogue in America. Sure, the secret police didn't read them anymore. But no one else did either. They were neither censored nor relevant. That's how American journalists feel most of the time, and we're used to it. But suddenly, writers are important again. It's flattering. I'm sorry, but it is.

I suspect my moment has passed, though. In the first three days of this week, my columns on Sept. 2 and 9 did not receive any hits. The most popular articles now are from the last month or two – and the one about the sneezing fetishists. Of course. Everything is back to normal.

But for a moment, the authorities and I were eye-to-eye, and I wonder if we even shared something. I mean, here's some investigator who has to look at crackpot Web pages all day, and he reads my article about how boring it is to watch a security monitor.

I cannot help but think I may have reached him.