In March, the Texas Department of Public Safety spent $4,487,500 on four Chevy Tahoes, but only about $600,000 of that was for the actual trucks. The rest, about $3.9 million, was for what’s inside them. Cell-tower simulators, backpacks, antennas, and a portable unit made by an Israeli surveillance company called Cognyte. Forbes broke the story on July 13. The Texas DPS deal is now the biggest Cognyte contract on record with any U.S. police department.
If you drive past one of those Tahoes this week, your phone will connect to it whether you want it to or not.
The tech is called FalcoNet. It’s a cell-site simulator. It pretends to be a mobile phone tower, and every cell phone in range automatically connects to it because, that’s what phones do. FalcoNet doesn’t care whose phone it is. You don’t have to be a suspect in a case, or someone who’s ever been suspected of anything. It just sweeps every device it can reach within its vicinity.
Per Cognyte’s own brochure, FalcoNet takes three minutes to set up and can force thousands of devices to connect per minute. It covers every cellular generation at the same time - 3G, 4G, 5G, everything. It can be hidden in a Tahoe or a backpack or it can be strapped to a helicopter. Once it’s running, it’s invisible to the phones getting swept.
This is the same kind of technology as the Stingray that L3Harris has been selling to federal agencies for years. The difference is that FalcoNet is faster, sweeps wider, and is now being sold directly to state and local police forces at a scale nobody’s seen before.
In 2015, the Department of Justice required the FBI and every other federal law enforcement agency to get a warrant with probable cause before using a cell-site simulator. Before that policy, the FBI used Stingrays regularly without warrants under a much lower legal standard. It took years of lawsuits to force the change.
That policy is for federal agencies, not state and local police. Texas has no state law requiring a warrant before Texas DPS fires up a FalcoNet. Then-State Representative César Blanco introduced HB 352 in a previous session to require warrants and transparency for exactly this kind of technology. Republicans in the Texas Legislature let it die. So right now, Texas DPS can drive a Tahoe through downtown Austin or across the border in the Valley or through any Texas neighborhood, sweep every cell phone in range, and log the data without asking a judge for permission.
In other words, the FBI has more restrictions on this technology than Texas has put on itself.
Now let’s talk about priorities (my favorite part about this state). Texas STILL hasn’t fixed the electric grid. ERCOT still can’t confidently handle a summer heat wave or a winter storm. Then there’s the $40 billion in AI data centers Greg Abbott personally recruited to this state are going to draw enormous new loads on that same grid, and nobody at the Texas Public Utility Commission has explained how it’s going to hold. Corpus Christi is rationing water and handing out rain barrels while Valero demands $80 million back. Rural hospitals are closing. Public schools rank around 47th nationally in per-student funding. Nurse practitioners still can’t practice at the top of their license because the Republican legislature won’t let them.
But Texas has $4.5 million lying around for Israeli spy vans.
Cognyte is an Israeli surveillance company that spun off in 2021 from Verint, which has documented ties to surveillance operations that have been used against journalists, activists, and civilian populations. Israel is the most surveilled country in the region because Israel operates a surveillance state over the Palestinian population it occupies. Biometric checkpoints, facial recognition, phone tracking…sound familiar? That’s what Cognyte was built to keep doing.
Now that product is being sold to police departments in the United States. Albuquerque bought in. The New York State Police bought in for their Canada border patrol. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement spent $765,000 on FalcoNet in 2024 for a program targeting Caribbean migrants. And now Texas DPS is the biggest customer on record.
We hear nonstop about the surveillance threat from China and Russian spy tech. We’ve heard about the dangers of technology like TikTok and Huawei. We don’t hear, EVER, about Israeli surveillance companies selling occupation-tested technology to our own police forces.
We are literally becoming a duplicate of Israel. Same equipment, same vendors, increasingly, same tactics on our own people. And we all know Texas is the testing ground for what they do nation-wide.
The state of Texas has built its entire identity on the idea that government should stay out of your business. “Don’t tread on me”, right? Big government is the enemy, personal freedom, blah blah. I’m sure you’ve seen the bumper stickers all over this state.
And then that same state government spends $4.5 million to intercept your cell phone data without you knowing, and without a warrant. The same Republicans who hoot and holler about federal overreach are the ones signing the check for it. Your tax dollars are paying to sweep your phone as you drive to work.
This is not public safety oversight, this is public surveillance. The framing that these purchases were made to keep Texans safe is what the state is going to brand them as. The actual capability they’re buying is the ability to track Texans without asking permission.
1. Read the Forbes report by Thomas Brewster. This is the kind of investigative reporting that keeps disappearing from local news.
2. Call your state representative and your state senator. Ask them where they stand on requiring warrants for Texas law enforcement to use cell-site simulators. Ask them specifically whether they’ll back a revived version of HB 352. Tell them it needs to be a priority.
3. On November 3, vote Gina Hinojosa for Governor against Greg Abbott. Vote James Talarico for U.S. Senate against Ken Paxton. Vote Vikki Goodwin for Lieutenant Governor against Dan Patrick. Texas DPS is a state agency and its budget and its policies run through the governor’s office, the lieutenant governor’s Senate agenda, and the state legislature. Every one of those is on the ballot. Register at votetexas.gov by October 5.
4. Send this to a Texan who doesn’t know about this. Show them what $4.5 million of their tax dollars bought.
See y’all tomorrow.
