Texas spends millions on four SUVs equipped for mass digital surveillance
Texas law enforcement is spending $4.5 million on four (yes, only four) Chevy Tahoe SUVs equipped to conduct mass digital surveillance — also known as geofencing — thus providing us with another example of the never-ending threat to liberty we are facing from nearly every level of government.
While it’s hard to find ways to make a 2026 Chevy Tahoe cost more than a million dollars, it becomes rather easy when you check the sticker and find it equipped with Israeli military-grade mass surveillance technology deemed necessary for public “safety” (via TheDrive.com):
Ominous Israeli surveillance tech is now being deployed on American roads. FalcoNet, brought to you by a company called Cognyte (Israel’s Palantir rival), secretly tracks people by intercepting the connection between your phone and the nearest cell tower. The idea is that you can strap this bad boy to a helicopter, backpack, or Chevy Tahoe and gobble up everybody’s data as you cruise around. It’s already in use in Florida*. This year, Texas State Police bought a little fleet of FalcoNet-equipped SUVs for just under $4.5 million. I found the purchase receipt and FalcoNet user guide to learn a little more about it.
In March of 2026, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Criminal Investigations Division asked for approval to spend $4,487,500 on a Cognyte surveillance setup. Actually, what they requested was “approval for emergency purchase necessary to protect the safety and welfare of state personnel and property. Delaying the procurement process could result in unacceptable safety risks to personnel and compromise operational readiness.”
The request memo is chock-full of urgency and dramatic language—peppered with terms like “emergency” and “immediate.” But no specifics are mentioned.
As for the FalcoNet system itself, the core principle people are rightfully freaking out about is the fact that it can hoover up private data from unsuspecting people en masse and in secret. (Emphasis mine)
* NOTE: For the “Ron DeSantis is awesome” crowd, I want to make sure you didn’t miss the line above mentioning that the Falconet mass surveillance technology provided by Cognyte and purchased by Lone Star State law enforcement is already in use in Florida — thus proving my contention that the Florida governor is just as big a threat to liberty as Donald Trump and nearly every Republican.
The FalcoNet system simulates a cell tower and forces phones in the vicinity to connect to it. Since phones are programmed to connect to the strongest signal automatically without the owner’s knowledge, connecting to the Texas police’s mass surveillance system occurs without notice — whether the phone belongs to a suspect or an innocent law-abiding citizen.
Ironically, the Supreme Court recently ruled 6-3 that this type of mass surveillance was a likely violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and its underpinning of modern rules on search warrants, stop‑and‑frisk, surveillance, and privacy.
Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan emphasized that “[a]n individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.”
Unfortunately, Trump-appointed justices were OK with the use of “geofence warrants” that allow government to indiscriminately spy on anyone, anywhere, at any time. Justice Samuel Alito, in his dissenting opinion (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett), contended that the majority’s opinion “will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine.”
As I make clear in Chapter 14 of my book, The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, these police state and mass surveillance tactics have been part of the Republican/Democrat playbook ever since the events of 9/11.
For example, Barack Obama began militarizing domestic police forces during his first year in office when his Department of Homeland Security ordered 750 million rounds of hollow point ammunition along with an additional 750 million rounds of miscellaneous bullets — including bullets capable of penetrating walls. At the time, it was enough ammunition to empty five rounds into the body of every living American citizen.
However, during Obama’s second term he entered the “let’s provide digital military equipment to civilian police” game. In January 2015, we learned details about how he had been secretly equipping law enforcement agencies at every level with radar technology that made it possible for law enforcement to look inside your home without entering it. According to a report by USA Today’s Brad Heath at the time, at least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies had equipped their officers with radar devices that allowed them to effectively peer through the walls of homes to see whether anyone was inside, a practice that obviously raised serious concerns about government’s ability to conduct indiscriminate surveillance operations.
The agencies involved in the secret program included the FBI and the U.S. Marshalls Service, agencies that had been using these radar systems for more than two years prior to 2015 with little to no notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they were used.
Near the end of his second term, Obama “suspended” militarizing local police and other law enforcement, but that all changed when Trump took office in 2017 and announced the revival of programs that provided local police departments with surplus military equipment — including weapons such as grenade launchers and armored vehicles. The Trump version of the plan greatly expanded the power of law enforcement to seize private property without due process and provided additional opportunities for police abuse along with the further erosion of our Constitutional rights.
Joe Biden allegedly tried to follow Obama’s lead to rein in militarizing local police forces, but his attempt was (intentionally?) so weak that he all he managed to accomplish was to preserve things done under Obama and Trump. And with Trump once again residing in the White House — what’s left of it — militarizing police has moved on from providing military equipment to local police to simply using the military as police.
The use of tools like geofence warrants to unconstitutionally obtain digital information isn’t new, just different, as we learned a few years ago when our benevolent overlords developed the keyword warrant, a tool that makes it possible for law enforcement to spy on virtually everyone’s internet activity without their knowledge.
A keyword warrant is basically an open-ended request for information on anyone who searches for particular terms online. Instead of the government saying, “I want all of arson suspect, John Doe’s, Google searches,” it says, “I want information on all the people who searched Google for ‘arson.'” In the first scenario, investigators have determined a suspect based on some evidence that they present to a judge, the typical standard for requesting a search warrant. In the second scenario, the government is asking search engines to provide data that they can use for whatever reason that suits its purpose.
In practice, geofence surveillance inevitably results in someone who has done nothing illegal being swept up in a government investigation based solely on that person’s internet activity or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Indiscriminate mass surveillance practices like the ones about to commence in Texas are designed as an end run around the Constitution and to make spying by law enforcement easier.
If the mass surveillance (geofencing) practices of Texas law enforcement teach us anything, it’s that government will manipulate and pervert seemingly clear legal standards and rules concerning digital privacy for the benefit of the state . . . Constitution be damned!
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He is the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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