Four Chevy Tahoes do not cost $4.5 million. The vehicles themselves ran about $600,000 combined — roughly $150,000 each. The remaining $3.9 million bought something far more interesting: FalcoNet, an Israeli-built surveillance app from Cognyte that impersonates a cell tower and forces every phone in range to connect to it. Your phone can’t tell the difference. Neither can anyone else’s. This isn’t about reading your texts — it’s about knowing exactly where you are.
What FalcoNet Actually Does to Your Phone
It’s not reading your texts — it’s tracking where you are, in real time, at highway speed.
Your phone constantly searches for the nearest cell tower, connecting automatically, no questions asked. FalcoNet exploits exactly that behavior. When active, it impersonates a cell tower across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G simultaneously, capturing device identifiers — IMSI and IMEI numbers — plus real-time location data from every phone in range. It can reportedly process thousands of devices per minute. Think of it as the Stingray concept from the flip-phone era, rebuilt for the 5G age and scaled to highway traffic.
FalcoNet cannot open your texts, photos, or apps. But location data tied to a unique device identifier is still deeply revealing — where you go, when, and whose phone was nearby. The antennas are hidden behind a false raised roof, making these Tahoes visually indistinguishable from standard patrol units. There is no warning. No bumper sticker. Nothing.
An Emergency Purchase That Was Already Budgeted
DPS called it urgent; the Texas Legislature had already funded it — pick one.
DPS filed this as an emergency procurement in March 2026, warning that delays posed “unacceptable safety risks.” Records show the Texas Legislature had already pre-funded the purchase. That is not an emergency — that is advance planning with a dramatic memo attached. This is also Cognyte’s largest recorded U.S. police contract. The backpack units and helicopter-deployable kits in the line items suggest statewide ambition, not a single-use experiment.
Public-interest technologists cited by Let’s Address Texas describe the vehicles as “spy SUVs” that “keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity — whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case or not,” noting that FalcoNet “doesn’t care whose phone it is.”
Texas has no state law requiring a warrant before DPS activates FalcoNet. No public rules govern how often it runs. No retention limits dictate when non-suspect data gets deleted. Every innocent driver whose phone pings those antennas enters the dataset.
What Texas legislators do next — warrant requirements, usage logs, mandatory public reporting — will determine whether FalcoNet remains a targeted investigative tool or becomes a permanent, highway-speed dragnet. Other states are already watching.
