{"id":391956,"date":"2026-07-30T13:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T13:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/391956\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T13:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T13:26:09","slug":"texas-state-police-spent-4-5-million-on-four-chevrolet-tahoes-heres-what-theyre-really-buying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/391956\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas State Police Spent $4.5 Million on Four Chevrolet Tahoes \u2013 Here\u2019s What They\u2019re Really Buying"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you drove past a standard-looking Chevrolet<\/a> Tahoe<\/a> on a Texas<\/a> highway this year and had your phone with you, there’s a chance it already knows who you are.<\/p>\n

An emergency<\/a> procurement filed by the Texas Department of Public Safety<\/a>‘s Criminal Investigations Division in March 2026 authorized $4,487,500 for surveillance equipment from Cognyte \u2013 specifically four 2026 Chevrolet Tahoes outfitted with FalcoNet, a cell-site simulator technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cognyte, headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, was separated from surveillance industry heavyweight Verint as an independent company in 2021. Cognyte is Nasdaq-listed, worth around $560 million per Forbes, and is essentially doing what Palantir does with data analytics, except it also sells you the hardware to go out and actively hoover up that data yourself.<\/p>\n

FalcoNet mimics a legitimate cell tower, tricking nearby phones into connecting to it by broadcasting a stronger signal than actual towers in the area. Once a device latches onto the fake tower, it automatically surrenders its identifying information and precise location. Each unit runs six simultaneous base station instances covering 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. According to Cognyte, the system can be operational within three minutes and process thousands of devices per minute. The antennas are tucked behind a false raised roof, so an equipped Tahoe looks indistinguishable from any other state police<\/a> SUV on the road.<\/p>\n

What $4.5 Million Actually Buys<\/p>\n

The Tahoes themselves cost $150,000 each \u2013 $600,000 total \u2013 which is already a strange price for a Chevrolet. The FalcoNet core systems across the four vehicles account for $2.85 million. The remaining roughly $1 million covers a FalcoNet Backpack Core V2 at $355,500, an additional unlicensed backpack unit, flexible antenna kits, a Cognyte Compact<\/a> PA Ranger<\/a>, amplifiers, racks, cabling, mounting hardware, and transport cases. The backpack units extend the reach beyond the vehicle<\/a> \u2013 agents can intercept on foot, or the whole system can be mounted to a helicopter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Texas procurement memo justified all of this through emergency language, warning that “any delay in procuring would compromise employee safety, public safety, operational readiness, and overall mission success.” What it didn’t include was any specific explanation of what threat had suddenly materialized that required bypassing standard procurement review. Texas DPS and Cognyte have both responded to public records requests with heavily redacted documents, and neither has publicly addressed what data-retention policies govern the system, what operational limits apply, or under what circumstances a warrant will be sought.<\/p>\n

Legally, things changed after the purchase was greenlit. A Supreme Court decision handed down on June 29, 2026, in Chatrie v. United States determined that broad, warrantless collection<\/a> of data from mobile devices violates the Constitution. FalcoNet captures signals from all mobile devices in its vicinity without distinction, sweeping up data from innocent bystanders just as readily as from targeted individuals. Josh Walkos, who writes the Substack We the Free, posted on X: “Use of Falconet appears to be in complete violation of the June 29, 2026, SCOTUS ruling in Chatrie v. United States, banning sweeping collection of mobile device data without a warrant. I wonder how agencies are justifying their use in light of the ruling.”<\/p>\n

Florida<\/a> has pursued similar technology, with its Department of Law Enforcement shelling out $765,000 for FalcoNet in 2024 to monitor Caribbean migration routes. The Department of Defense picked up a FalcoNet backpack for $400,000 the same month Texas closed its deal, per Forbes. Cognyte’s U.S. revenue grew from $10 million in 2023 to $15 million in 2025, and the company has also placed equipment with the Albuquerque Police Department and the New York<\/a> State Police.<\/p>\n

The Stingray controversies of the early 2010s spent years working through the courts before meaningful oversight emerged. FalcoNet is the same concept<\/a>, upgraded to cover every cellular generation simultaneously, disguised inside a vehicle you’d never look twice at, and being deployed right now with no public framework governing what happens to the data it collects. The purchase order even contains a line item for a “Flexable” antenna kit \u2013 misspelled exactly like that \u2013 which is probably the least alarming thing about the whole document.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you drove past a standard-looking Chevrolet Tahoe on a Texas highway this year and had your phone…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[20962,138026,138024,138025,27,2785,29,28],"class_list":["post-391956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-chevrolet","tag-data-analytics","tag-falconet","tag-surveillance-equipment","tag-texas","tag-texas-dps","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}