There are up to 200,000 aircraft and vessels moving through U.S. airspace and waters at any given moment. For watch officers at the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Air and Maritime Operations Center (AMOC), identifying threats in that data flood had become increasingly complex.
To address this challenge, DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) contracted Vantor to build a custom software solution called Kestrel—an advanced AI-powered platform that uses artificial intelligence to sift through hundreds of thousands of signals and serve as an intelligence radar assistant for border security operations.
For over 25 years, Vantor has supported U.S. government missions with groundbreaking spatial intelligence. Kestrel represents the next frontier of that legacy, transforming massive raw data streams into actionable insight for operators who need to make timely decisions.
Kestrel continuously monitors aircraft and maritime vessels in the U.S. region and immediately alerts AMOC operators when activity appears suspicious based on geographical and kinematic metadata associated with a track. The workflow complements persistent monitoring use cases where rapid detection matters.
The results speak for themselves. In fiscal year 2023, Kestrel drove a 500% increase in suspect activity detection, helping to call attention to suspicious activity leading to major drug interdictions and the seizure of $81 million worth of narcotics for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Monitoring multiple tracks meant processing five to ten terabytes of streaming data daily which needed to happen fast, so that alerts are sent back in a timely manner for action to be taken. To help AMOC, Vantor architected a platform that could support processing large amounts of data while keeping the latency under ten seconds. Vantor engineered Kestrel to solve this problem through three core capabilities:
- Data Integration: Fuses data from government and open-source feeds across air and maritime domains for a unified operational picture
- Spatiotemporal Analytics: Custom Vantor-built algorithms evaluate how objects move through space and time and enrich it with context to pinpoint suspicious patterns
- Automated Alerting: Alerts appear directly on watch officers' existing operational screens—no additional monitors required
Kestrel eliminated a long-standing trade off in border security—choosing between comprehensive monitoring or rapid threat detection. More data meant slower processing. Faster alerts meant narrower coverage. With Vantor’s design, operators no longer have to sacrifice one for the other.
The Vantor team implemented a multi-tenant development environment that allows other developers, data scientists, engineers, and mission partners to safely prototype analytics on live data. This research and development ecosystem ensures new capabilities deploy correctly on launch.
Kestrel’s multi-domain architecture is designed to create room for what comes next. Today it monitors and analyzes aviation and maritime activities. Tomorrow Kestrel could expand across land and cyber domains—potentially tracking movement across physical and digital environments.
Vantor is not only supporting today's border-security mission. The company is expanding its capabilities to meet evolving threats with a flexible software platform that can scale multi-source datasets to include land and cyber domains, aligning with broader defense missions and AI-powered change detection workflows.
