After 2004 the FBI shifted to "preemptive prosecution": informant-driven stings in which the Bureau's own operatives — often paid six figures or working off criminal and immigration troubles — supplied the plan, the money, the rhetoric, and the fake weapons. Studies of the era's hundreds of terrorism prosecutions found that nearly half relied on informants and that in the highest-profile plots, the government itself was the plot's engine. Marginal, impoverished, and sometimes mentally ill defendants received decades under terrorism enhancements for conspiracies that could never have occurred without the sting.

The Newburgh Four became the emblem: four Black men from a struggling New York town, recruited by informant Shahed Hussain with offers of $250,000, convicted in 2010 of a synagogue-bombing plot the trial judge said the government had "manufactured," adding that the FBI "made them terrorists." In 2023 the same judge ordered three of them released on compassionate grounds, calling the operation a stain on the justice system. The Fort Dix Five, the Liberty City Seven, and dozens of similar cases fill the support lists of Muslim political prisoners — men serving sentences for the government's imagination of their intentions.