They're watching you. Now, with the help of privacy advocates in New York and in Washington, D.C., you can watch them too.

Surveillance cameras have been observing New York City dwellers for years as part of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's tough crime-fighting tactics, and since Sept. 11, cameras have also popped up in Washington — which has left some people in both cities feeling safer and some feeling violated.

"They look like ornaments or street lights," said Bill Brown, the director of Surveillance Camera Players, whose Web site notbored.org has mapped more than 5,000 cameras in New York since 2000.

"The people you would think have maps [of the camera locations] — city council, local community boards, the mayor's office — either don't have them or aren't making them available," he said. "That leaves it up to individuals like me."

Brown also gives weekly walking tours, scheduled on his site, throughout Manhattan — in Times Square, Chelsea, Fifth Avenue and the United Nations — in neighborhoods, he says, that are least likely to need them. He says he doesn't believe cameras have been placed in these neighborhoods, which currently have lower crime rates than poorer communities, to deter crime.

After retracing New York Civil Liberties Union's count of 2,397 cameras in 1998, and adding his own, Brown discovered very few cameras in poor neighborhoods.

"If one believes that surveillance cameras are installed to prevent crime then one would expect that they are mostly installed in high crime areas," he said, adding that the cameras should be labeled to discourage crooks. He says it might deter someone from doing a crime if they knew they were being watched.

Of Brown's count about 15 percent of the surveillance cameras are owned by police, while the others are privately owned and used mostly for collecting insurance money after property crimes, he says.

Besides the walking tours, Brown has set up Surveillance Camera Theater, a performance art project he has helped spread internationally via his Web site. The concept is to perform either original works or adaptations of other people's plays in front of the street monitors.

Since the cameras do not record sound, signs are held up in front of them to "educate" passersby and to let the watchers know they've been exposed. In a play called "It's OK," Players hold up signs reading "It's OK officer. Just going to work."

Brown said a lot of traffic came to his site by mistake on Sept. 11 through search engines looking for Manhattan Web cams. This was also a time of a lot of hate mail to his site by people in favor of surveillance.

"You are offering information that may be of importance to the enemy and you should be watched. I recommend you take down your site and wake up!" wrote one reader. "We live in a new era and we must be realistic."

In Washington, the Metropolitan Police Department's surveillance fever started after Sept. 11, according to a Washington-based watchdog group, Electronic Privacy Information Center. The center maintains a Web site, observingsurveillance.com, showing intricate photos of half of the police department's dozen reported cameras around the White House, the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument.

Kate Rears, the editorial director for EPIC who set up the Web site, said that police weren't as open about the cameras as they are now, before a Febuary 2002 Wall Street Journal report brought the electronic eyes to the public's attention.

She said the main purpose of the site is to open the cameras up to debate, adding that even though the surveillance is in a public place she doesn't want her actions recorded and kept.

Charles H. Ramsey, the Washington police chief, said at a hearing with the U.S. House of Representatives in March that there have been reports about the department's video surveillance branch that are less than factual.

"Perhaps the biggest misconception in this whole area is that we are operating some type of 24-hour a day, 7-day a week video monitoring operation," he said. "We are not."

Monitor videos are activated only during marches or demonstrations and presidential inaugurations, he said.

There's a pop-up window on EPIC's site calling to have supporters e-mail their city council and urge for legal regulations of surveillance.

"But I wouldn't be opposed to it if [the cameras] were banned outright," said Rears with a small laugh.

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