This creepy Israeli spy tech is likely operating in a city near you

Since the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks, surveillance and debates surrounding it have become part of the American experience. In recent years, Ring video doorbell users have successfully pushed back against the company’s policy of sharing data with police departments. A nationwide movement is demanding the discontinuation of Flock Cameras, a widely adopted automatic license plate reader that gathers data on anyone who drives past. However, another concerning surveillance trend has flown under the radar. Since 2023, local and state police departments across the country have purchased technology for real-time monitoring of smart devices from the Israeli firm Cognyte Solutions LP.Israel is a hub of spy technology, with more surveillance companies per capita than anywhere else in the world. This phenomenon is largely due to the elite Israeli Military Unit 8200, a signals intelligence unit that serves as a pipeline to private industry, with a reported 80% of founders in the domestic homeland security industry having served in the unit. However, Cognyte had a slightly different founding story stretching back to 2018. The company was originally the security and defense division of Verint Technologies, another Israeli firm. In October of that year, a Haaretz investigation accused Verint of allowing its technologies to be used by authoritarian governments to oppress their citizens. The company’s telecommunications monitoring equipment, called Cell-Site Simulators (CSSs), was, according to the report, used by Azerbaijan and Indonesia to hunt down LGBTQ+ citizens, by South Sudan to spy on enemies of the regime, by Bahrain to imprison a famous human rights activist in the country, and by the Bogota Police to surveil political demonstrators. A year after the Haaretz report broke, in December of 2019, Verint announced it would spin off a new, independent company from its security technologies division, named Cognyte. In 2020, Cognyte was found, according to documents published by a Burmese human rights group, to have sold its proprietary CSS software, known as “FalcoNet,” to Myanmar’s military just before its coup attempt. According to a U.S. State Department report released after the sale, the regime was regularly monitoring cellular and electronic communications of its citizens, surveillance that helped enable extrajudicial killings, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and a host of other abuses. Although the State Department report made no specific mention of Cognyte, the firm was one of only two major surveillance-for-hire firms to be doing business with the Burmese armed forces. The offending technologies in all of these cases, CSSs, are radio frequency transmitters that retransmit a signal from an existing cell tower, amplify it, and dampen any background signals. This tricks a phone’s innate connection algorithm into connecting with a CSS, allowing access to all unencrypted calls and messages. This means a CSS operator can then peek at the usage of all connected devices in real time, regardless of the devices' intended target. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a leading anti-surveillance legal and advocacy group, has found that the software is used in over 80 U.S. police departments nationwide. According to the group, it has played a role in a wide array of covert, warrantless searches. Worse, these simulators continue to advance. In recent years, we have learned these devices now operate on 5G and Wi-Fi bands, meaning app usage and internet searches can also be monitored. They can also be installed in false ceilings in police cruisers, which can be activated like a built-in GPS, or even specially made backpacks, both of which Cognyte sells. This makes them highly portable, easily deployable, and extremely difficult to track.Starting in 2022, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) purchased Cognyte hardware to monitor the cell phones of Haitian refugees, with a further contract being finalized in 2024. That same year, Albuquerque PD awarded Cognyte a contract to be its sole Cell-Site Simulator provider.Baltimore Police Department also has a documented Cognyte connection, but it is unclear if they are still contracting with the firm. Cognyte is listed as a technology vendor on BPD’s website, but the contract appears to have expired in 2023 and, per the Atlas of Surveillance, a new CSS provider was engaged.The last calendar year has been especially successful for Cognyte in the American state and local law enforcement sector. Since late 2025, it has won bids with three major law enforcement agencies in the U.S.: the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., in November; the New York Police Department in December; and the Texas State Police in March of 2026. The Texas State Police told RS the technology is being used solely for search and rescue. None of the other departments responded to requests for comment, nor did Cognyte Solutions.The major question remains: should citizens be concerned by the adoption of this technology, especially considering the company and country of origin’s respective records on human rights? Civil liberties expert Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights and Dissent, an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., said that these systems, on their face, are violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches based on their tendency to collect more data than those of their specific target. ”I can’t imagine why law enforcement would want to use this technology unless the goal is…. to create a dragnet under the mistaken belief that new technology is somehow exempt from existing protections,” Gibbons told RS. Cognyte and its predecessor Verint are not outliers in aiding human rights abuses. Israeli defense and security firms are known to test their technologies on Palestinian citizens in the West Bank or Gaza, raising concerns even before their products are widely distributed. And despite the Israeli government’s role in approving and licensing arms exports, many Israeli firms continue to face accusations of misconduct. Firms such as Cellebrite, which sells hardware to hack locked phones, and NSO Group, a purveyor of “zero-click” malware that assumes control of a smartphone without any user interaction, are facing international scrutiny, in part, because of sales to repressive governments.Most of the contracts noted above displaced incumbent vendors. So why are agencies switching to Cognyte? It is hard to say at the moment. Part of the trend may be due to a highly usable AI-enabled data dashboard, dubbed “NEXYTE”, that, according to the company’s website, “allows law enforcement to connect the dots faster.” Public demonstrations featured on the site show a data-fusion system that takes publicly available information, like social media posts, and combines it with police investigative files. These are used to create a “threat score” and link a subject to “known accomplices.” One demonstration classifies an individual as a “drug mule” based on an Instagram post about expensive perfume, a purchase deemed inconsistent with the individual's expected income level. It should be noted that, although this software appears to be Cognyte’s central offering according to their public webpage, contracts obtained by RS do not indicate if this system is included in its CSS offerings. Gibbons stated that although the technology itself concerns him, the source gives him further pause since Israel is a nation with “very permissive surveillance.” “There are many problems in the United States…however, we have something more of a system, at least on paper, for regulating the police and intelligence agencies. These technologies are being produced in a context that is fundamentally different from ours,” Gibbons said.