Israel’s Palantir Rival Is Selling $1 Million Spy Vans To U.S. Cops
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 the Biden administration in 2023.
In a recent yearly filing with the SEC, the company promoted its work with border and intelligence agencies, saying, “By applying advanced analytics, behavioral pattern recognition and real-time intelligence, our technology helps agencies detect suspicious activity, identify potential trafficking or smuggling operations and prevent illegal border crossings.”
Today, Cognyte says it has government customers in over 100 countries, some of which have invited controversy. In 2024, surveillance operatives close to former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro used Cognyte’s phone location tracking technology to spy on political opponents, according to the AP. In late 2021, Meta accused Cognyte of running over 100 fake accounts across its social media platforms to collect information on journalists and politicians in countries like Serbia, Colombia and Kenya. Before Cognyte spun out from Verint in 2021, it reportedly sold similar phone interception technology to countries with weak human rights protections: In 2020, it sold tech to Myanmar, reportedly against an Israeli government ban on sales to the country.
Cognyte did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The firm’s former parent company Verint, itself spun out of parent company Comverse Technology in 1994, was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $2 billion last year and taken off the public market. It was led by CEO Dan Bodner, a former engineer in Israel’s IDF, up until the merger. In 2021, human rights advocates called out Verint for the sale of phone interception tech in South Sudan, where Amnesty International accused it of being used to “terrorize” journalists and activists. A Haaretz report from 2018 claimed Verint technology was used by Indonesia to track LGTBQ activists and religious minorities.
Cognyte’s tools are part of a growing arsenal of surveillance tech that American law enforcement is now using to snoop on smartphones at scale. That includes spyware which infiltrates devices and monitors communications, such as the surveillance systems sold by Paragon, which has contracts with ICE. Other tactics include acquiring location data from the mobile advertising industry, or impersonating other parts of global cell networks to monitor locations. Cognyte offers the latter through a product called Skylark, which allows law enforcement to track a device with just a phone number.
Police have used cell-site simulators, like L3Harris’s Stingrays, for years, but Cognyte claims its system is faster to use and has greater capacity. In a brochure handed out at a border policing expo in Arizona last year, it claimed FalcoNet takes only three minutes to set up and can force thousands of devices to connect to it every minute. It also appears to be cheaper than the competition; in New Mexico, it undercut the nearest competitor, American provider Jacobs Engineering, by $100,000.
Police deploy simulators in two ways. Sometimes, if they have a phone number and a general location of a suspect, they’ll take the fake cell tower to that area to obtain more precise coordinates. Or, cops will use it to “canvas” a neighborhood where they know illegal activity takes place, then try to pinpoint which devices are being used by criminals.
But civil liberty experts are concerned that the explosion of this type of technology means innocent citizens will be caught up in the government dragnet. “When you have these kinds of surveillance technologies that enable surreptitious collection of information about people, targeting of protesters, mapping of relationships, that always poses concerns for democratic functioning and accountability,” says Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice think tank.
Earlier this month, a judge in Ohio agreed, slapping down a law enforcement attempt to gain a canvassing warrant because it would’ve allowed police to grab phone data from “thousands of uninvolved, unsuspecting individuals.” It would have given law enforcement officers “unbridled discretion to examine the movements of private citizens at all times for thirty days,” the judge wrote.
Cops typically get a warrant to deploy this technology. But not always. Beau Duffy, the executive director of public information at the New York State Police, tells Forbes that the department uses Cognyte’s surveillance van in emergency situations without a warrant. “An active kidnapping or child abduction presents a clear example of exigent circumstances, as the victim's life is in immediate danger,” Duffy says. Baltimore, which acquired a cell-site simulator from Cognyte in 2022 for $920,000, said the tool could be used for a maximum of 48 hours without a warrant to locate suspects of “serious” but unspecified crimes. Texas’s Department of Public Safety didn’t respond to questions about how its vans are used.
For Cognyte, selling spy trucks across the U.S. has helped open the door to upsell its other surveillance technologies. In the same month it signed the Texas contract, Cognyte published a press release celebrating a $5 million sale of an unspecified technology to an unnamed agency. CEO Elad Sharon, a long-time Verint executive, noted in the release that it had opened up a “pathway for potential expansions as the agency scales its intelligence capabilities.”
Already, Cognyte has sold some of its data analytics tools, which use artificial intelligence to analyze vast stores of information to surface leads. Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia spent $800,000 in late 2024 on the analytics software, while New York and Florida state agencies paid more than $300,000 each for it.
Cognyte is guarded about where and how its technologies are used, however. In Florida, it has a $2.1 million contract from 2024 for a “data acquisition system,” details of which have been kept “confidential,” per state records. And when Forbes filed a public records request with Texas for more details on its vans, both the police department and Cognyte provided heavily-redacted records, providing no more insight into the capabilities or use of the surveillance technology. The state attorney general is now deciding whether or not the redactions should be removed.