The NYPD says it will restart the procurement for a proposed $750,000 cellphone surveillance system and invite competing bids, rather than award the contract directly to Israeli firm Cognyte. The department said the proposed purchase did not qualify for a sole-source award; the decision leaves open the possibility that Cognyte could still win the contract through competition.
The department had been negotiating since December 2025 to adopt Cognyte's FalcoNet, a mobile AI-driven surveillance system, according to a New York Daily News report. FalcoNet simulates a cellphone tower, prompting nearby phones to connect so police can track suspects. The proposed device would have been mounted on NYPD vehicles. A separate Daily News report said the system can also be mounted on drones or concealed in a backpack, and that it captures each phone's unique identification number, which can then be traced to its user: nydailynews.com.
“It did not meet the criteria for a sole source procurement, so we are moving to an open, competitive procurement process,” an NYPD spokesperson said. The Daily News reported that the reversal followed criticism of the proposal and a meeting between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Cognyte remains eligible to submit a bid.
Who Is Cognyte, and Why the Alarm
Cognyte, an Israeli corporation, presents itself as a competitor to American software company Palantir. Human rights groups have alleged that governments, including Israel's, have used the company's technology to target adversaries and opponents. Cognyte has also been barred from several Meta platforms. Advocacy groups say FalcoNet could enable unconstitutional tracking of suspects and people who are not under investigation.
City Council Member Tiffany Cabán opposed spending more city money on mass surveillance. She pointed to allegations that FalcoNet has been used by governments in Israel, Myanmar and South Sudan to track dissidents and people targeted by state violence, and urged the city to sever ties with companies that profit from human rights abuses. State Senator Julia Salazar also argued that expanding mass-surveillance tools would not make communities safer, citing concerns about their use against political dissidents.
Council Member Julie Won criticized Mamdani for considering the proposal, arguing that warrantless surveillance of ordinary New Yorkers would undermine trust between communities and the NYPD rather than improve safety. Earlier this month, Won had called on Mamdani to remove Tisch as police commissioner. Tisch joined the NYPD as an intelligence analyst in 2008 and helped architect the department's Domain Awareness System.
Mamdani's Own Record on Surveillance
Mamdani has voiced opposition to some forms of police surveillance. In 2023, he co-authored an opinion piece in City & State supporting legislation to bar police from creating fake social media accounts, describing that practice as “widespread and dangerous.” The FalcoNet proposal has prompted criticism from Council members who say his administration came close to allowing the contract to proceed.
What the NYPD's Existing Policy Allows
NYPD policy generally requires detectives to obtain a warrant before using cell-site simulator information in investigations. The policy identifies searches for missing or suicidal people as circumstances in which a warrant is not required. It also says simulators will be used only for the period authorized by a search warrant. The department already uses other cell-site simulators to locate suspects and missing or suicidal people. The department's published policy, reviewed by Hoodline, says an addendum will be prepared as necessary to describe any additional uses of the technology under the POST Act, according to the NYPD.
Who sets the rules?
The New York City Procurement Policy Board promulgates the rules that guide how city agencies solicit bids and award contracts, according to the New York City Comptroller’s contracting primer. The primer describes the board’s role but does not specify what public notice or review steps apply to this particular proposal. Federal standards provide a separate comparison, not the rules for NYPD. The U.S. Department of Justice’s September 3, 2015 policy required federal law-enforcement agencies to obtain a probable-cause search warrant to use cell-site simulators, subject to exceptions. That policy does not govern the NYPD, whose published requirements are described above, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Legal Aid Society has argued that the technology turns New Yorkers' cellphones into tracking devices. The organization told the Daily News that the NYPD had used cell-site-simulator technology more than 1,000 times without a written policy or a warrant, and has urged lawmakers to set clear limits on government and commercial surveillance. Under the original proposal, only four members of the NYPD's Technical Assistance Response Unit would have been authorized to use FalcoNet. The department said the system would not be used to listen to calls, collect data such as text messages from phones unrelated to investigations, or share such data with other agencies.
A Pattern Playing Out Nationwide
New York is far from alone in wrestling with this technology. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement spent $765,000 on FalcoNet in 2024 for Operation Vigilant Sentry, while Baltimore acquired a Cognyte cell-site simulator in 2022 for $920,000, according to Forbes. Texas state police went further still, paying $4.5 million for four Chevrolet Tahoes equipped with Cognyte surveillance technology, and the company has also sold surveillance vans to the Albuquerque Police Department and the New York State Police. Cognyte says FalcoNet can be set up in just three minutes and can force thousands of devices to connect to it every minute.
Federal agencies have leaned heavily on similar tools for years. By 2014, federal law enforcement had purchased 434 cell-site simulators totaling more than $95 million, per the New York Civil Liberties Union's broader concerns echoed in reporting on the technology. ICE deployed cell-site simulators at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019, according to documents obtained by the ACLU, and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News indicated the agency used the tools more than 1,885 times between 2013 and 2017, as detailed by TechCrunch. The outlet reported that authorities do not always get a warrant for their use, and critics say the devices ensnare innocent people by default.
Boston offers a cautionary tale about how such purchases can bypass public scrutiny altogether. The Boston Police Department bought a cell-site simulator in 2019 for $627,000 using federal civil-forfeiture funds, a workaround that let the department circumvent City Council review entirely, according to WBUR. That same year, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that real-time surveillance of a person's cellphone constitutes a search.
For now, the city is reviewing public comments on the original sole-source proposal as the new competitive bidding process moves forward. Whether Cognyte or a rival vendor ultimately wins the contract remains to be seen, but the fight over FalcoNet has already forced an unusual public reckoning inside City Hall over how far New York's surveillance apparatus should reach.
