I was watching the evening news the other night, comfortable in the knowledge that Brian Williams was telling me everything important that I really needed to know. There came a story – a very short bit, just a mention really – about this new flying surveillance camera the Pentagon had developed that both looked and flew like a humming bird.

What was that?

Yup. There it was, right there over Brian’s right shoulder, flitting about on the screen just like the humming birds of my youth that used to hover outside my bedroom window in North Carolina when I was a kid, chasing after the honey-suckles that grew in such abundance there.

It appears the Pentagon has developed a tiny flying, humming bird shaped surveillance camera that looks just like the real thing.

I was intrigued, so I did a quick search for “pentagon humming bird camera” and quickly found a link to the actual video: http://bit.ly/h8TOQh . At first I thought it was frankly one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. But then watching that little humming bird fly around that parking lot, and then into and around the building, I began to get a very disturbed feeling.

There are now camera’s that – from even a modest distance – appear to be the real thing – a small bird flitting about. This means that the operator of that tiny mechanical fowl could fly it into my window if he wanted to. Or your window. And the humming bird of course is just the start. Mankind is the most amazing of creatures. It is said we double our collective knowledge every ten years. How long will it be before that hummingbird becomes a moth or a hornet? How long before there is no way to tell anymore where the cameras are and just exactly who is watching?

All of those nightmare visions of Orwellian futures come crashing back to the forefront of my mind. Big Brother keeping tabs on us all with tiny flying microscopic cameras. Thousands and millions of them, flitting about all over the place like an infestation of house flies. And all the time they are beaming back their signals. Reporting to The Man all the goings on of the masses, as we poor slobs trudge on through our miserable work-a-day lives.

Ok, that was probably a bit dramatic – pardon me. But it is a little creepy to think about these things flying around. And it frankly scares the crap out of me to think about where this technology might lead is in ten or twenty years.

I don’t know what the solution is to all of that, but I do think you should do what I am doing.

Be afraid.

Be very afraid…