The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

`Big Brother' is indeed watching There is a print-out of an aerial picture on the wall of my cubicle at work-- it's a view of my farm. Some might think that is pretty ordinary, since aerial photographs are nothing new. Matter of fact, I've shot a few myself. But this one is different. It's actually a satellite shot. Downloaded from the Google Earth website, I have captured an image of the farm, showing all sorts of neat things, including the fence rows, tile drainage runs, buildings, even the little trees and bushes that spot the property. Even more interesting is the fact that I just typed in the name Georgetown, Ontario, Canada and it zeroed in from a full-blown image of the earth, right down to little old Georgetown-- in seconds. All I did was follow the streets and roads which I travel each day to get to and from work, until I located my farm. I also located my sisters' homes, various landmarks in both Acton and Georgetown, as well as places I've visited across Ontario. As I viewed those images, I was struck with two very different emotions. The first, catering to the techno-geek in me, was one of excitement, having the technology to check out things at a consumer level that was originally reserved for the super power military forces. Then I thought about it some more. Big Brother really is watching. Looking at those images, I can seen gravel trucks rolling by on the sideroad south of my place, I can see where my neighbour parked one of his pieces of farm equipment, and if I look really closely, can almost identify what type of equipment it actually is. A little research into the military capabilities of the same systems told me that not only can they see the equipment, they can also isolate identifying aspects of it. In ideal conditions, they can actually see the make, model and colour of a car. Satellite images of terrorist camps are viewed in heat reading format, allowing them to see any warm bodies sleeping in the tents. Apparently, (again in ideal conditions) they can identify the gender of the people from the images as well. This is the stuff that Tom Clancy writes about-- but it is real, not fiction. If we have nothing to hide, I suppose there's no need to worry. The service is great for locating places, especially when displaying the images in `hybrid' format, which overlays a map on top of the image. But one thought did come to mind as I pondered it. I think I might just pull my blinds when I get dressed from now on.