Texas $4.5M in phone-tracking SUVs with no warrant requirements

Texas needs a warrant rule before DPS turns on its new phone-tracking SUVs. Two steps. Hold an interim hearing this fall. Pre-file the bill for January. What the state bought. In March, DPS paid $4,487,500 for four Chevrolet Tahoes running FalcoNet, a cell-site simulator from Cognyte. The SUVs cost $600,000. The surveillance gear ate the rest. DPS filed the deal as an emergency, skipped competitive bidding, and never said what the emergency was. The Drive obtained the purchase records and reported it in July. Why it matters. A cell-site simulator impersonates a cell tower. Every phone in range connects and hands over its identity and location. It can’t skip the phones that don’t belong to a suspect. The Justice Department has made federal agents get a probable-cause warrant since 2015. Texas has no matching statute. Senator Bryan Hughes filed SB 2093 in 2019 to write one. The Senate passed it 30 to 1. House Criminal Jurisprudence let it die without a vote. Seven years later, DPS owns four of these vehicles. Nobody outside the agency knows when they run, whether a judge approves, how long bystander data sits in storage, or who can pull it up later. What I’m asking. Get DPS before your committee this fall to testify on the purchase and its written use policy. Then pre-file a bill for the session opening January 12, 2027. Require a probable-cause warrant. Delete data collected from people who aren’t targets. Publish usage numbers every year.