A sizable crowd had gathered around the camera.
More than 25 people stood at the edge of a Home Depot parking lot in Berlin Township on Saturday afternoon, signs in hand.
"Get the Flock outta Jersey!" "Don't spy on me" "This camera is spying on you."
Among them, a volunteer sweated inside a homemade costume built to resemble the very thing they'd come to protest — Flock cameras. The costume was black and boxy, with white gloves and sneakers.
The mascot's name? Flocky, of course.
Each time the nearby light turned red, they called across the lanes to the idling drivers.
"They got your license plate," one person shouted.
The camera they'd surrounded — an automated license plate reader made by Flock Safety — captures images of passing vehicles, logs their plates and identifying features and feeds the data into searchable databases used by law enforcement. The company and others like it have attracted the ire of some residents across the country, who say the cameras amount to warrantless mass surveillance.
Residents packed a Franklin Township council meeting in Somerset County this month to demand the town drop its cameras, and a petition there has drawn more than 800 signatures. DeFlock South Jersey, barely a month old, held Saturday's demonstration — one of the first coordinated grassroots efforts against the technology in the state.
"We're trying to educate the public about the growing mass surveillance in South Jersey and around the country," said Adam Sheridan, one of the group's organizers. They are "creating this dragnet mass surveillance project that we think we need to call attention to and start fighting back against."
Sheridan helps lead Lonaconing Indivisible, a local arm of the progressive network behind the "No Kings" rallies. But he said DeFlock South Jersey is deliberately non-partisan.
"We have people that voted for Kamala Harris and we have people that voted for Donald Trump," Sheridan said. "This is about a core American value: the police, the government, needs a reason to be searching you, to be looking into you, to be surveilling you."
The crowd that had gathered spanned generations. Andrea Sparano and Joe Di Carlo, both 79 and retired, first heard of Flock Safety two weeks ago, at a Berlin community meeting.
"I went, what is that?" Sparano said. "It's like, 'Oh, my God.' Never heard of it before. Never saw it." She called the cameras "an invasion of privacy."
Di Carlo, a Vietnam veteran, said he supports local police but draws a line.
"I don't like them gathering information on me unless I'm volunteering to give it," he said. "And I don't know what they're going to do with that information." Helping local police is one thing, he said, but anything beyond that "it's un-American."
David Montero, 25, hadn't planned on being there. A regular at the shopping center, he'd noticed the camera the day before and was startled — he assumed it was new. Driving back Saturday, he saw the protest and stopped to join.
"I don't want America to become a totalitarian country, and I don't want a surveillance country," he said. "I don't want the big brother to be looking at every single, every single individual all the time."
Flock maintains that its technology helps police solve more than a million crimes a year, along with locating stolen cars and missing people.
Amid the mounting backlash, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley announced earlier this month the company would tighten its controls: cutting its recommended data-retention period from 30 days to seven, requiring officers to attach a case number to every search and letting cities block other agencies from searching their cameras for immigration enforcement.
Civil liberties groups are skeptical. The ACLU called the shorter retention window a possible step forward, but dismissed the rest as "retreads" of measures that hadn't worked before.
"Flock makes a big deal about how they can prevent crime via these cameras, but there's no evidence that that's the case," Sheridan said.
DeFlock South Jersey wants towns to cancel their contracts and stop installing new cameras. It also wants Trenton to set statewide rules, like warrant requirements and data retention limits. Several state lawmakers have taken up the issue, though no bills have yet passed. State Sen. Michael Testa, a South Jersey Republican, announced plans for a bill adding privacy guardrails after NJ.com published an investigation last month into the widespread use of the technology across the state.
Some cameras are put up by private businesses like Home Depot. But most in New Jersey are operated by law enforcement agencies like local police, prosecutor's offices and sheriff's offices.
"We have had parking area security cameras in place at our stores for many years, as many retailers do," a spokesperson for Home Depot said in an emailed statement to NJ.com. "These cameras are used solely as a security measure to prevent theft and protect the safety of our customers and associates in our stores."
Sheridan argues the risk is broader: A store can still hand footage to local police who couldn't collect it themselves without a warrant, and with less accountability.
"I can submit an open public records request to my local police department," he said. "I can't do that with Home Depot."
After the Home Depot, the group planned to hit four more cameras across Camden County — in Stratford, Lawnside, Haddonfield and Cherry Hill. Most people don't know the cameras are there, Sheridan said, and the tour was meant to show how thoroughly they cover an ordinary trip.
"No matter where you go in Camden County, you can go from here to the Cherry Hill Mall, and your entire trip is going to be tracked," Sheridan said.
Part of the group drove to Stratford next, to a Flock camera on the Rowan University campus, where about 10 protesters gathered. Jaspreet Singh Kalsi, a third-year medical student at Rowan-Virtua, lives across the street from campus, within sight of one of its four cameras. He and his roommate crossed the road to bring the demonstrators water.
Kalsi said his opposition comes from his training in medicine. A camera that logs who comes and goes from a clinic could expose a patient's private health information, he said.
"Privacy is a human right," Kalsi said. "There's too much evil that can happen when privacy is not a guaranteed right."
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