WASHINGTON — Big Brother is being put to work this Memorial Day weekend in terrorist alert-plagued New York City.

For the first time in the Big Apple, U.S. Park Police will run a controversial facial recognition and video-based computer system at Battery Park, where all visitors to the Statue of Liberty board a ferry, and on Ellis and Liberty islands. The system, created by Jersey City, N.J.-based Visionics Corp., is known as "Face-it." A different technology was first tested at the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla.

Beginning today and continuing through Monday, Park Police will use the system to videotape citizens at random who visit the New York landmarks.

New York citizens are on edge after a series of terror alerts this week, including intelligence indicating a number of city monuments may be attacked. It is also Fleet Week in New York, with U.S. Navy warships in port available for the public to view and board.

The Face-it system's computer contains a database — provided by various federal agencies including the FBI — of terrorist suspects and wanted criminals.

Using technology that scans various measures of the human face, the system uses biometrics to search for "matches" of faces found in the crowd with those on the database. The lightning-fast system can match 15,000 faces per minute.

Experts say the facial recognition technology is coming to Canada soon, likely to appear first at airports. It is already being tested at four U.S. airports in Dallas, Boston, Fresno, Calif., and Palm Beach, Fla.

The plan is for Canadian law enforcement agencies to eventually share a facial recognition database of wanted persons with U.S. agencies, much as the two countries now share a DNA database.

There has been an outcry from privacy and civil liberties groups about the growing use of the technology, particularly after a Tampa man was mistakenly recognized and improperly accused by police of child neglect.

Rights advocates say the technology represents an invasion of personal privacy and harkens back to author George Orwell's book 1984, which warned of a future day when everyone would be watched by Big Brother through "telescreens."

Park Police spokesperson Brian Feeney said signs will be posted at the New York City sites this weekend informing the public that the technology is in use. "We have arranged it so that when there is no match with the database (of wanted persons), the system drops the video capture of a person's face. We call it, `no match, no memory,' so the general public knows we're not recording innocent people," Visionics official Meir Kahtan said.

Questions about how large the Park Police database of wanted persons is, and how many video cameras will be in use this weekend, are all classified as secure information.

Kahtan said when the system's computer reaches a certain statistical level of supposition that it has a "match," an alert goes off. A Park Police official in a control booth would then compare the video image captured with the mug shot or photograph of the wanted person and make the final decision about radioing officers on the ground to make an arrest.

Meanwhile, Associated Press reported yesterday the U.S. Transportation Department has warned transit and other railroad systems about possible terrorist attacks.

Also, the FBI is publicly warning about a possible terrorist threat from scuba divers.