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Notes -
This more or less aligns with my view. That gets me suspicious. I don't actually know that much about FBI counter-terrorism arrests, the specificity of our cynicism has me concerned that I may have ingested a meme. (You probably already knew more of the information below. I'm not assuming that you're a meme puppet. I might be because I did not have the data before forming the opinion.)
So let's break out the equipment and get me a diagnosis.
There doesn't seem to be easily accessible data about the number of FBI operations that result in arrests. The best sources GPT-5 has found for me so far are the United States Attorney Annual Statistical Reports. Here is FY2024 for an example.
Table 3B on Page 14 shows that in FY2024 there were 432 cases filed in the Terrorism/National Security Critical Infrastructure program category. That's tied for the most with FY2021 but ~200-400 cases a year has been the ballpark figure since FY2019.
The problem, as always, is aggregation. It's unclear how many of those cases were Terrorism-Terrorism, in the Whoopi Goldberg rape-rape sense, that involved an active plot (even if basically run by the Feds) versus crimes like providing material support to terrorists or trespassing on national security critical infrastructure.
You could scrape all the cases and have an AI categorize them but I'm not that worried about my health - I might be a moron talking nonsense but this isn't something where I'm going to suffer any real consequences for being mistaken. So I had GPT-5 summarize. It thinks - and I asked for very rough numbers - about 55-70% of them were Domestic Terrorism related with things like hoaxes, support, etc. not being particularly common.
However. More complications. The notes on Domestic Terrorism included this gem: "Since 2020, domestic-coded cases have far outnumbered international ones, driven heavily by 2020–2022 waves (e.g., Capitol-breach-related charges and civil-disorder/threats statutes appearing under the terrorism/internal-security program)."
I remain unsure of the prevalence of serious, imminent plots. But I am now convinced that the government should, as a public service, make available an AI equivalent to or better than GPT-5 Thinking that has easy access to all public information.
But this is also a checkup of how well I've integrated the information environment. So I asked GPT-5 for summaries of major news stories around similar plots. It found 8 from the last 5 years - interestingly, it did not include the Gretchen Whitmer case. Of those 8, it assessed that FBI undercover operation involvement in the planning was High in 5 cases, Unknown in 2 (including today's), and Low in 1. The Low one was a tip.
High involvement means things like "CHS + FBI “assets” sold two AK-47s in sting". See the table at the bottom of the GPT-5 conversation.
Final Diagnosis? I feel pretty good that my baseline assumptions, while not always being correct, are directionally accurate. Anyone who disagrees with The_Nybbler and I is either unaware of the data or the brainless meat puppet of an idea.
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