An Israeli Company Is Quietly Arming American Police With Cell Phone Trackers

Texas paid $4.5 million for four unmarked SUVs built with technology to intercept nearby phones. It is one of a growing list of U.S. agencies buying from Cognyte, an Israeli firm with a controversial past. At least 75 law enforcement agencies across 27 states are publicly known to possess the technology, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, though researchers say the true figure is likely much higher because many purchases remain shielded by non-disclosure agreements and only emerge through public records requests. The devices work by impersonating legitimate cell towers, compelling every nearby phone to connect and briefly revealing its unique identifiers and location, regardless of whether the owner is a criminal suspect or a law abiding citizen.

This March, the Texas Department of Public Safety spent $4.5 million on four brand new Chevrolet Tahoes. On the surface, the purchase looked like a routine fleet upgrade. In fact, the vehicles were built to carry a piece of surveillance hardware that can monitor the location of every cell phone in the surrounding area, whether it belongs to a criminal suspect or a bystander walking past.

The equipment, called FalcoNet, is made by Cognyte, an Israeli surveillance company based in Herzliya. According to the terms of its Texas contract, the system can be tucked inside a vehicle, folded into a backpack for officers on foot, or bolted to a helicopter. It performs largely the same function as the Stingray, the surveillance device made famous over the past decade by the American defense contractor L3Harris.

How a cell-site simulator works

THE MECHANICS 1. Impersonate a tower.  The device broadcasts a signal that mimics a legitimate cell tower. 2. Force a connection.  Nearby phones, programmed to link to the strongest signal, connect automatically, without the owner’s knowledge. 3. Harvest identifiers.  Once connected, the device can log a phone’s location and unique identifying numbers. 4. Cast a wide net.  Every phone in range is swept in, not just a suspect’s.

Officers deploy the equipment in one of two ways, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If they already have a suspect’s phone number and a rough location, they drive the device close enough to pinpoint the exact coordinates. Alternatively, they can canvas an entire neighborhood where they suspect illegal activity is occurring, then sift through the data afterward to identify which device belongs to whom.

Texas is far from alone. Cognyte, which trades on the Nasdaq with a market capitalization of roughly $560 million, has been steadily building a customer list among American law enforcement agencies since it spun out of the Israeli surveillance conglomerate Verint in 2021. The Albuquerque Police Department in New Mexico and the New York State Police, which patrols the Canadian border, have both purchased Cognyte surveillance vans. The same month Texas signed its deal, the Department of War paid $400,000 for a portable FalcoNet backpack unit.

Florida has been an especially eager customer. In December 2023, the office of Governor Ron DeSantis signed a $793,000 purchase order for FalcoNet equipment, including thirteen base station units priced at $765,000, to support Operation Vigilant Sentry, a federal mission aimed at intercepting migrants crossing the Caribbean by boat. Florida later spent millions more on additional Cognyte hardware and software, some of it described in public filings only as confidential.

We don’t like to talk about it.
  — Wake County, N.C. Sheriff Donnie Harrison, on his department’s cell-site simulator

Part of Cognyte’s appeal appears to be price. In New Mexico, the company undercut its closest competitor, the American contractor Jacobs Engineering, by roughly $100,000. In marketing materials distributed at a border security expo in Arizona, Cognyte claimed FalcoNet can be set up in three minutes and can force thousands of devices to connect to it every minute, a pace the company presents as an improvement over older Stingray-style systems.

A technology that predates its critics’ ability to track it

Cell-site simulators have quietly spread through American policing for more than a decade, and the scale has always been difficult to pin down because of nondisclosure agreements many departments signed with manufacturers. The American Civil Liberties Union identified 75 agencies across 27 states known to own the devices as of its last public count, while a separate ACLU policy analysis put the number of federal, state and local agencies with access to the technology above 50. Researchers have long cautioned that both figures likely undercount real usage, since many departments have gone to considerable lengths to avoid disclosing the tool even to judges and defense attorneys.

The legal ground under the technology has been shifting. On June 26, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie v. United States that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in location data revealing their movements, and that even short-term tracking of that kind counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment, according to EFF’s reporting on the decision. The ruling does not name cell-site simulators directly, but privacy lawyers expect it to shape future challenges to warrantless use of devices like FalcoNet, which by design collect location data from anyone in range, not just a named suspect.

Texas has owned some version of this technology since 2014, according to records compiled by the Atlas of Surveillance, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno. What has changed is the scale of investment and the sophistication of the hardware now built directly into unmarked patrol vehicles.

Estimates of how widespread the technology has become vary depending on who is counting and when. A Georgetown Law review put the number of agencies with access to simulators at more than sixty, while an earlier Cato Institute analysis placed the use of the technology in at least 23 states and the District of Columbia. The inconsistency itself is part of the story. Many of the underlying purchase records were never meant to be public, and some only surfaced after journalists and civil liberties groups filed open records requests over several years.

That secrecy has a specific origin. For years, many departments that bought Stingray-style devices from L3Harris signed non-disclosure agreements barring them from describing the equipment in police reports, let alone in court. Officers and prosecutors sometimes referred to the device only as a confidential source or a pen register, obscuring from judges and defense attorneys how a suspect’s location was actually obtained. It is not yet clear whether Cognyte has required similar agreements from its own customers, since the company does not publish its contract terms and did not answer questions about them.

Cognyte, for its part, markets FalcoNet as a tool for border and intelligence work as much as domestic policing. In a recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company described its technology as helping government customers detect suspicious activity and identify trafficking or smuggling operations through pattern analysis of the data it collects.

Florida’s use of the system to canvas the waters off the Keys for migrant vessels, and the Department of War’s purchase of a portable unit the same month as the Texas deal, both fit that broader pitch. Domestic police departments, by contrast, tend to describe the same hardware in narrower terms, as a tool for locating a specific suspect or a missing person.

That framing understates what the equipment actually does once it is switched on. Because a simulator cannot selectively ignore phones that do not belong to a suspect, everyone within range, shoppers, commuters, protesters, is swept into the same signal and logged in the same database, at least momentarily. Whether that data is retained, for how long, and who can later access it depends entirely on the internal policy of whichever department bought the equipment, since neither Texas nor most other states require the practice to be disclosed by statute.

A vendor with a complicated history

Cognyte says it counts government customers in more than 100 countries, a footprint that has drawn scrutiny abroad. In 2024, operatives with ties to former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro reportedly used Cognyte’s phone location tools to monitor political opponents, according to the Associated Press.

In late 2021, Meta accused Cognyte of running more than 100 fake accounts across its platforms to gather information on journalists and politicians in Serbia, Colombia and Kenya.

Before it spun out from Verint, the company’s predecessor reportedly sold interception technology to Myanmar in 2020, in apparent violation of an Israeli government restriction on sales to the country. Verint, Cognyte’s former parent, was acquired last year by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $2 billion and taken private.

For now, oversight of how American police use the equipment rests largely with the departments themselves. Texas’ Department of Public Safety has not published a public use policy specific to FalcoNet, and its $4.5 million purchase was disclosed only through routine state contract reporting required under Texas law for expenditures above $100,000, not through any proactive announcement. As more departments sign similar deals, the gap between what the technology can do and what the public is told about it appears, for now, to be widening rather than closing.

Stay ahead of the stories shaping our world. Subscribe to Impact Newswire for timely, curated insights on global tech, business, and innovation all in one place.

Dive deeper into the future with the Cause Effect 4.0 Podcast, where we explore the ideas, trends, and technologies driving the global AI conversation.

Got a story to share? Pitch it to us at info@impactnews-wire.com and reach the right audience worldwide