Ars Technica is always impressive; the site has good reporters and good editing. Indeed, it reports! But consider its latest story from the front lines of the RIAA’s war on file-sharing.

Now, the RIAA says it’s stopping the mass lawsuits, but for various reasons it’s continuing with the ones already in the pipeline. The Ars story is about one of those cases.

Here’s the impression you take away from it: A woman with a rudimentary understanding of computers gets dinged by the RIAA for file-sharing, but says she doesn’t know how to download. She thought she was the target of a scam. It wasn’t, and she was found in default in a federal case—but fortunately some local law professors stepped in and are helping her out.

A heart-tugging story, no?

But … a lot of this seems fishy. She claims she was only a basic computer user and her husband didn’t use the family computer at all. That’s believable as far as it goes, but then we hear that her two kids, 19 and 21, didn’t use it either … and didn’t have computers of their own.

That’s less likely, but god knows not every kid is Twittering these days.

Read the Ars story carefully, however, and things get fishier.

Our computers carry a lot of incriminating information about us, like it or not. The woman’s computer?

[Her] home computer actually became nonfunctional in the spring of 2007 and was removed from her home by her brother, who took it to his house to fix it. He found a machine infected with “one or more viruses” and then replaced the hard drive, recycling the original.

This doesn’t quite track. If it was “non-functional,” how did the brother find the viruses on it? And if you have viruses, you either clean them out or, as a last resort, wipe the hard drive. Viruses are software issues. They don’t ruin hardware.

And note how this practically off-the-grid family suddenly has a brother who’s swapping out hard drives like a pro.

Track the chronology carefully and it certainly seems possible that there’s a different scenario: The woman could have been getting notices from the RIAA in 2007. Her hard drive is suddenly “non-functional” and, conveniently, disappears. She decides to play dumb. (Real dumb—the story says she’d been “personally served” with legal papers a year ago.)

The RIAA’s legal campaign against file-sharers is misguided and destructive and counter-productive, the dangerous flailings of a wolverine with its leg caught in a trap.

It is also, in its mass-attack strategy, certainly likely to hit a few innocent people.

The opponents of it like to cite the examples of 70-year-olds, or 7-years-olds, who for one reason or another have their names turn up on subpoenas.

Nothing wrong with using whatever means are available to undermine a corrupt industry’s crazy and damaging legal campaign.

But as the Ars story suggests, here’s also going to be a category of cases where the subjects make some bad decisions. Jammie Thomas, who ended up getting fined more than $200,000, tried a variety of things to explain away the downloaded songs on her computer, but the jury looked at, among other things, her long-running use of the screen name that downloaded the songs and didn’t believe her.

Thomas is getting a new trial, for other reason, and that’s the point. Opponents of the RIAA should be attacking it head on, and not waste time focusing on the RIAA’s missed shots—particularly when the shot may not have missed in the first place.