Not too many years ago, the mere existence of reconnaissance satellites was an official secret.  Everybody knew that they existed, but there was no official acknowledgement.  How things have changed.  These days, you can go to GlobeXplorer and get a picture of your neighborhood.  I got this picture of our neighborhood by typing in our address, and this picture of our property and our neighbors’ by zooming in once.  (Our place is the one with the pool and trampoline.)

The Terraserver web site also has satellite images, but it’s a little harder to get an image of a particular place unless you have the longitude and latitude.  You can type in your city and state, and then navigate to find your house, but it’s not nearly as nice as entering your address.  One benefit of Terraserver, though, is that it will tell you if there are multiple images, and let you select the one you want to view.