Almost 100 more Flock cameras to be installed across Edison, N.J.

Our Take

CBS New York reports that Edison, New Jersey officials have signed off on close to 100 more Flock Safety cameras, with police framing it as a straightforward crime-fighting upgrade. It never is. Each camera is a node in a growing, networked system that logs the plate, location, time, and travel pattern of every car that passes — regardless of whether the driver has ever been suspected of anything. Multiply that by a hundred cameras in one town, and you get a dragnet that can reconstruct where residents go to work, worship, protest, or seek medical care.

The pitch is always the same: a few cameras to catch the bad guys. What towns rarely get is a public conversation about retention periods, who else can query the data, or how far this network already reaches once it's tied into Flock's national sharing system. Edison residents are being asked to trust a private company's black box with their daily movements, with almost no independent oversight of how that data is used or who's looking at it.

Credit to CBS New York for putting a number on this expansion — most of these rollouts happen quietly, buried in council meeting minutes nobody reads. If you want to see how dense this surveillance net already is near you, check our camera map, and if Edison's plan bothers you, our take-action page has steps for pushing back before the cameras go up.