NYPD moves toward three-year, $750,500 no-bid deal for Israeli phone-tracking system as Cognyte’s record draws scrutiny

The New York Police Department is moving toward a three-year, $750,500 no-bid contract with Israeli surveillance firm Cognyte for FalcoNet, an advanced cell-site simulator. The New York Daily News reported that the AI-driven device impersonates a mobile tower to secretly intercept and track individual phones.

The compact system can be concealed in a backpack, mounted on a police cruiser or attached to an airborne drone. Reuters previously reported that Cognyte sold intercept spyware to Myanmar’s state telecom operator weeks before the country’s 2021 military coup. That same year, Meta banned Cognyte from its platforms after finding that customer networks used fraudulent accounts to target and spy on journalists, opposition politicians and civil society members in Kenya, Mexico and Indonesia.

The post situates the deal within the expanding international reach of Israel’s military-surveillance sector, saying much of its commercial footprint developed through intelligence operations against Palestinians. It says techniques and technologies refined by units such as Israel’s elite Unit 8200—including the routine archiving of mass phone interceptions to enforce the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem—are increasingly exported directly to municipal police departments across the United States.