As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, I just learned about another potential invasion of my privacy––I call them “peeping drones.” Here’s the background that leads to my current paranoia:

The professor/husband of one of my best friends recently published a gripping novel called Drone Wars: The Beginning (by Mike Whitworth, available on Amazon.com). It’s set in the not-too-distant future in which a college professor publishes dissenting viewpoints about the government and its “leaders.” One day his home is attacked, demolished, and his wife killed––by a drone. He spends the entire novel trying to escape the government minions who are attempting to eradicate him, and those who think as he does, by pursuing him with killer drones.

For weeks after reading that book, I would duck and run whenever I heard an airplane engine overhead.

This past week, a young man who delivers Schwan products––but who is also a budding filmmaker––told me about a new camera he recently purchased that is mounted on a small….wait for it….drone. He showed me videos taken from that drone as it flew over rooftops, highways, through the foothills around Phoenix, with magnificent views of the mountains surrounding the valley, and a glorious setting sun. The resulting film was crystal clear and breathtaking. I thought it must have cost him many thousands of dollars, but apparently these small programmable drone/cameras can be purchased for much less than I had imagined.

He told me that when he was showing the film to another acquaintance, his friend said, “Yeah, I got one, too. This is what I shot yesterday.” The man then showed him a video, taken from his drone camera. The film began with a panoramic view of a neighbor’s back yard, and then a close-up of the house. Next, the drone flew up to the back patio and took pictures of the interior of the neighbor’s house through the windows.

At this point in the story, my paranoia began growing, and growing.

A seven-foot-high cement block wall surrounds my property, and my house is wired and monitored 24/7 by a security company. My windows are un-shuttered, but I feel so secure that I’ve never worried about intruders, or what I’m wearing (or not wearing), or “peeping toms.”

That is, not until now. How am I going to protect myself, and my property, from “peeping drones?”

If drones are so readily available to the general populace, I’m concerned for our future. If our country cannot control the purchase and use of firearms, how will it ever manage to control the purchase and use of drones? And if a camera can be mounted on a flying drone, what else? Why not an AK47? (I know nothing about guns, I just read that somewhere.)

The phrase that leaps to mind is Brave New World, a book by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932. The book presents an ironic view of a futuristic world. The title is borrowed from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1:

O wonder! / How many godly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! / O brave new world, / That has such people in it.

Obviously, old Bill was speaking with his tongue firmly planted in cheek when he wrote that.