Big Brother's Here The Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Four ended more than a decade ago, and without the Orwellian nightmare of the book by the same name. But it now appears the author simply missed the date. Although the government, through law enforcement and the courts, has chipped away at our Constitutional rights - they are not where the threat lies. No, the worst assailant is, and will be, technology...and the companies that profit from it. The Internet has served to connect a lot of people, and, as we saw in a recent murder case, email is retrievable...and readable. Ollie North got a taste of this nasty lesson - people may forget, but computers rarely do. I don't want to sound paranoid, like my neo-luddite friend Randy, but sometimes when I read the paper, I become paranoid. Take, for example, an article in Monday's paper, entitled, "Commercial spy satellites coming soon." Go ahead, take a minute and mull that one over. Scary, huh? The end of the Cold War has brought us many things. Among them is a host of technology companies that will be looking for new markets, now that the U.S. government is no longer shopping as heavily as they once were. And they will do whatever it takes to create customers. In the aforementioned case, talk is of high resolution capable spy satellites orbiting the globe, snapping pictures of areas as small as three feet square. And those pictures will be available for sale. For a fee, they may even turn the cameras towards a specific destination on the planet. Go ahead...think about that! Are you scared yet? No? Well, how well do you get along with your neighbors? Because it may be them, tiring of hearing you giggling in your hottub (discretely tucked behind that six-foot wooden fence - but virtually out in the open to a camera miles above), that finds a use for this service. Or your boss. Or the guy you just beat at poker, the waiter you didn't tip...who knows? Anybody who can fork over for the pictures can get an image of what you are up to on your own property. This is a nation of voyeurs. It is undeniable. Just look at the incessant coverage of the O.J. Media Event, which even preempted the President's State of the Union address on some networks. A nation that is more interested in the sordid affairs of a former football star than they are in the future of their country has a seriously bad case of Peeping-Tomism. But I would think that most of us could agree that if O.J. is interesting on a national scale, then certainly someone we know is even more interesting. I mean, wouldn't you rather know the down and dirty on someone in your own community, that perhaps had a little more stature than you think they deserve? If we're going to peek in windows, we are not going to limit it to far away windows. Since that habitual voyeurism is unlikely to change, imagine what can be done with high resolution satellite capability. It might even make some people put a shirt on when they're working in their yard! On a more serious note, people with broader interests can use this technology to spy on anyone that does not necessarily support their cause. Whether it is a company spying on its employees, or a major corporation spying on, say, Greenpeace, it still gives me the willies. And that is where the concern should lie. Big Brother will be watching, but he won't be sitting in the White House, or at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. He may have invested heavily in both of those locations, but he will not, himself, sit there. No, he will simply be watching, taking notes, and taking pictures. Maybe they'll even put the pictures on the Internet. The next jpeg you download may be your own...