Texas state police’s purchase of four brand new Chevrolet Tahoes this March was unusual. Not just because of the staggering $4.5 million price tag, but because the vehicles were kitted out with technology that could monitor the locations of nearby cell phones.

Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity — whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case or not. Cognyte’s contract with the state of Texas reveals that the simulator, called FalcoNet, can be concealed within the vehicles, hidden in a backpack for on-foot missions or attached to a helicopter. It’s the same technology as the infamous Stingray, one of the original cell-site simulators made by defense giant L3Harris.

Texas state police is one of a growing number of local law enforcement agencies signing deals with Cognyte, an Herzliya, Israel-based company listed on the Nasdaq with a $560 million market cap. The six-year-old company, which was spun out of Israeli surveillance giant Verint in 2021, sells a range of surveillance tech. That includes software that claims to find leads in big police datasets and predict where crime is likely to occur in the future. The firm, which touts itself as the “leading alternative” to $315 billion market cap Palantir, made most of its $400 million in 2025 revenue in Israel and Europe. But it’s slowly making inroads in the U.S, with American revenue gradually rising from $10 million in 2023 to $15 million in 2025, per filings with the SEC.

The same month as the $4.5 million Texas deal, its biggest on record in the U.S., the Department of War spent $400,000 on a FalcoNet backpack. Cognyte has sold surveillance vans to the Albuquerque police department in New Mexico and the New York State Police, which helps patrol the border between Canada and the U.S. In 2024, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement spent $765,000 on FalcoNet for Operation Vigilant Sentry, a mission targeting mass migration via the Caribbean that was enacted by........

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