Warrantless Tracking

Texas / Surveillance

Don’t Tread on Me, Except From a Tahoe

Texas DPS spent $4,487,500 on four Chevy Tahoes and Cognyte FalcoNet cell-site simulators. The trucks cost about $600,000. The rest bought a machine that impersonates a cell tower. The agency has not published the rules.

In March 2026 the Texas Department of Public Safety spent $4,487,500 on four Chevrolet Tahoes and a pile of Israeli-made surveillance gear. The trucks were the cheap part. About $600,000 bought four 2026 Tahoes at $150,000 each. The other $3.9 million bought Cognyte’s FalcoNet: vehicle cores, 5G licenses, backpack units, antennas, and a portable amplifier package.

Forbes called it Cognyte’s largest known U.S. law-enforcement deal. DPS did not answer basic questions about when the systems get turned on. The public was left with an emergency memo, a receipt, and a slogan that suddenly needed an asterisk.

If the state is going to impersonate the phone network, the least it can do is say so in English.

The receipt is not a rumor

The Drive obtained the purchase order. The line items are public.

• Four FalcoNet core systems: $2,850,000
• Unlicensed FalcoNet core: $200,000
• Four Delta 5G perpetual licenses: $280,000
• Four 2026 Chevrolet Tahoes: $600,000
• FalcoNet backpack core (2G/3G/4G/5G): $355,500
• “Flexable” antenna kit: $27,000
• Cognyte Compact PA Ranger: $105,000
• Unlicensed backpack core: $70,000
• Total: $4,487,500

Documents

• The Drive investigation and line-item breakdown
• Purchase order PDF (DPS PO 26P0010314)
• Forbes: “Israel’s Palantir Rival Is Selling $1 Million Spy Vans To U.S. Cops”
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram local follow-up

The PO is dated March 4, 2026. It is marked EMERGENCY PURCHASE. The justification talks about employee safety, public safety, operational readiness, and “mission success.” It does not tell the public what emergency required four covert 5G intercept platforms on a rush order.

That language is a tell. When an agency wants a tool badly enough to skip ordinary scrutiny, the tool is the story.

What FalcoNet actually is

FalcoNet is a cell-site simulator. Same family as the Harris Stingray. It broadcasts as if it were a legitimate tower. Phones are designed to latch onto the strongest nearby signal. So they attach. Then the operator can pull identifiers and location signaling from devices in range.

Two modes matter:

1. Hunt a known phone. You already have an identifier. You drive, walk, or fly until the radio lights up and you close the distance. Missing person. Fugitive. Kidnapping. This is the use DPS later cited.
2. Canvass an area. You do not know which phone is the target. The box collects identifiers from whatever is nearby so investigators can try to pick a suspect device out of the crowd. Every bystander phone in range is part of the catch.

Forbes and Cognyte marketing both describe concealment in a vehicle, a backpack, or on a helicopter. Vendor material says setup takes about three minutes and that the system can force thousands of devices to attach per minute. The antennas can sit behind a false raised roof. From the street, it looks like another state Tahoe.

That is the point. If it looked like a surveillance truck, people would behave differently. The product is designed so they don’t.

What it is not

It is not, on the public record, a magic key that opens everyone’s texts, photos, and contacts. Federal DOJ policy for this class of device says simulators used in criminal investigations may not collect the contents of communications. Identifiers and location are still intimate. They are not the same thing as reading the phone.

Overclaiming that point is how this story gets dismissed. The real problem is already ugly enough: a state police vehicle that can harvest who is here without asking the carrier, without the target knowing, and without a published Texas rule for what happens to the people who were just driving to work.

Location plus a unique device ID is a biography. Church. Clinic. Union hall. Motel. Protest. Ex’s apartment. “We only grabbed the IMSI” is not a privacy policy. It is a euphemism.

The legal hole is the scandal

In 2015 the Justice Department told its own agents they generally need a probable-cause warrant before using a cell-site simulator, with limited exigency exceptions, plus deletion rules for non-target data.

That is a DOJ policy. It is not a statute that binds Texas DPS.

Read it yourself:

• DOJ press release, Sept. 3, 2015
• DOJ policy PDF

Texas has no enacted statute that says, in so many words, “DPS must get a warrant every time it turns on a cell-site simulator.” In 2019, then-Rep. César Blanco filed HB 352 to require warrants for this exact technology, with stolen-phone and life-threatening exceptions, plus public disclosure of investigatory equipment purchases. It was left pending in committee. It died. A related Senate effort that session, SB 2093, also tried to put cell-site simulators under a warrant framework. Texas still does not have a clean, public, CSS-specific warrant-and-minimization statute.

That does not mean the Constitution clocked out at the Red River. Carpenter v. United States treated extended cell-site location data as a search. Courts have already started choking on “canvass” warrants that would let police sit on a city and vacuum identifiers from thousands of uninvolved people. In June 2026 a federal magistrate in the Northern District of Ohio denied a 30-day, 24-hour canvassing cell-site simulator warrant as overbroad and insufficiently particular.

So the honest legal picture is this:

• Federal agents have a written warrant policy.
• Several states — California, Washington, Virginia, Utah, Illinois among them — passed their own CSS warrant laws.
• Texas bought the hardware first and left the rules unpublished.
• DPS has not produced a public FalcoNet use policy, retention schedule, audit log standard, or bystander-deletion rule.

“We might get a warrant sometimes” is not a safeguard. It is a shrug.

This is how the market works now

L3Harris used to dominate this niche. After years of scandal, nondisclosure agreements, and agencies dropping charges rather than admit a Stingray was used, the old monopoly cracked. Cognyte — spun out of Verint, Nasdaq-listed, pitching itself as a Palantir alternative that also sells the radios — walked into the gap.

Forbes reported FalcoNet already in Albuquerque, with New York State Police on the northern border, and with Florida FDLE. The same month as the Texas deal, the Department of War bought a FalcoNet backpack. Texas just wrote the biggest known police check.

The pattern is familiar:

• Buy it as an “emergency.”
• Hide the antennas.
• Answer no operational questions.
• Let the public discover the capability from a car blog and a Forbes reporter instead of from the agency that works for them.

The ACLU has documented the older version of this culture for years: FBI nondisclosure agreements that pressured local police to keep the technology out of court files, even if that meant walking away from a prosecution. New vendor. Same instinct. Keep the method darker than the case.

“Don’t tread on me” is not a procurement category

Texas politicians can give a stemwinder about federal overreach on Monday and sign a $4.5 million intercept fleet on Tuesday. Those two sentences cannot occupy the same moral universe without one of them being a lie.

Nobody serious argues that police should be forbidden from finding a kidnapped child or a shooter fleeing a massacre. That is why warrant statutes have exigency exceptions. The fight is not “find the killer” versus “abolish radios.” The fight is whether the default setting for a device that necessarily touches every phone on the block is a judge, a written particular description, minimization for bystanders, deletion, and an audit trail — or a captain, a Tahoe, and a memo that says “trust us.”

If the mission is as clean as DPS implies — missing persons, high-threat manhunts, emergency response — a warrant rule does not kill the mission. It forces the agency to say out loud what it is doing to people who are not the target. Agencies that refuse that conversation are not protecting tradecraft. They are protecting discretion.

Who is actually fighting this

This is not a left-only hobby. The last serious federal CSS warrant bill drew both civil-liberties groups and limited-government groups. That is the coalition Texas needs and has not built.

National groups that have done the work on cell-site simulators

• ACLU — Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Model bill, FOIA litigation against ICE/CBP, warrant and minimization recommendations. See the federal recommendations and model legislation PDF.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation. One-pager on cell-site simulators. Litigation to unseal CSS warrants. Technical work detecting fake towers. Surveillance Self-Defense.
• Brennan Center for Justice. Rachel Levinson-Waldman, quoted in the Forbes piece, has been the adult in the room on surreptitious collection and accountability.
• Project On Government Oversight — brief on the Cell-Site Simulator Warrant Act.
• Electronic Privacy Information Center
• Restore the Fourth

The 2021 Cell-Site Simulator Warrant Act — Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Steve Daines in the Senate, Reps. Ted Lieu and Tom McClintock in the House — was endorsed by a coalition that included EFF, Brennan Center, EPIC, POGO, and Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. The warrant rule is not a culture-war toy. It is a Fourth Amendment floor.

Texas-facing pressure

• ACLU of Texas — the first call for a public-records demand on DPS FalcoNet policy, deployment logs, NDAs, and retention rules.
• Texas Civil Rights Project — already fighting the adjacent stack, including Flock cameras and other mass location tools.
• Texas Policy Research — conservative/constitutionalist framing of the same Tahoe purchase.
• The reporters who pried the documents loose: Thomas Brewster at Forbes and Andrew P. Collins at The Drive.

If someone in the Legislature wants to pick up Blanco’s dead bill and do it properly this time, the model is sitting there: warrant by default, narrow exigency, mandatory disclosure to the court that the tool will touch non-targets, deletion of bystander identifiers, a use log, and no more “emergency” purchases that hide a strategic surveillance program inside a vehicle line item.

Five questions DPS still has not answered

1. When can FalcoNet be powered up? Named-target only? Area canvass? Protests? Border operations? Traffic stops?
2. What paper is required? Warrant every time? Pen-register order? Supervisor signature? Nothing?
3. What is collected from non-target phones, and how long does it live?
4. Who can query the data, and is there an immutable audit log?
5. Will prosecutors tell defense counsel and the court when a case touched this system?

Until those answers exist in public, the official story is incomplete. The hardware is not.

The line

A free state can hunt a murderer without building a silent census of every phone that happened to be on the same frontage road. The difference is not the existence of the tool. The difference is whether a judge stands between the tool and the crowd.

Texas spent nearly $4.5 million to make sure the crowd never sees the tool. That is not toughness. That is a government that decided the Fourth Amendment is a branding problem.

Don’t tread on me. Fine. Then don’t mount the treads behind a fake roof and call it public safety.

Suggested Blogger title: Don’t Tread on Me, Except From a Tahoe
Suggested labels: Texas, DPS, surveillance, Fourth Amendment, Cognyte, FalcoNet, privacy