They live in New Jersey, Michigan and Washington state — six young men arrested in recent weeks and charged in an alleged ISIS-inspired terror plot.
The suspects, among others, are accused of using encrypted messaging and social media apps “to share extremist and ISIS-related materials that encourage attacks” in the US, including on the LGBTQ+ community in Michigan, according to a criminal complaint.
The Michigan plot, which may have been planned for Halloween, was intended to be possibly on the scale of the 2015 Paris terror attacks before it ultimately was foiled, authorities say.
The arrests illustrate “how people are self-radicalizing, operating in echo chambers online,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism Rebecca Weiner told CNN.
“This isn’t as simple as there is an entity called ISIS that’s operating overseas that’s reaching into our homeland, recruiting and radicalizing people,” Weiner said. “This is a much more nuanced dynamic, where people are finding each other online, doing that mutually reinforcing self-radicalization, finding like-minded people overseas, some of whom may have connections to the actual terrorist organization. So it’s much more muddy, but it is also much more dangerous than a simple model that we’ve dealt with before.”
CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller, Weiner’s predecessor at the NYPD, interviewed Weiner on Monday about the case.
Miller: We just saw this domino series of cases in rapid succession, with a common theme that they were connected to ISIS, radicalized online, conspiring online. What does it all mean?
Weiner: So, you have multiple elements at play, many of which we’re familiar with. All of them together, this is an incredibly significant disruption. An alleged cell involved in attack planning, plotting in Detroit. At the same time, an overlapping network of would-be foreign fighters looking to join ISIS, allegedly in Syria overseas.
We’ve seen a sustained focus on ISIS-inspired plotting. You’ve had a horrific attack on New Year’s Day in New Orleans. Last November, disruption of an ISIS supporter allegedly looking to carry out an attack on Election Day. Last September, a disruption of a Canadian individual who wanted to target a synagogue in Brooklyn. But this is broader in scope and extends farther in geography than most recent disruptions for the last several years.
Miller: So, draw a chronological map for me. It starts – as far as the takedowns – it starts in Michigan, so start with Michigan and where does it spread out to?
Weiner: Starting in Michigan, disruption of a cell of individuals who were amassing weapons, ammunition, had done training, talked about a number of different potential outlets for this plot – targets of an imminent potential attack in Michigan. At the same time, you have an ongoing investigation, a network of individuals in New Jersey, in Seattle, overseas, who were planning allegedly to travel overseas to Syria to join ISIS. Of course, the imminence of the potential attack in Michigan being the impetus to bring the whole network down.
Miller: What were, between all of these people and places, the different kinds of attacks that were discussed?
Weiner: You had targeting allegedly of the LGBTQ community. You had targeting potentially of (the) Jewish community. You had firearms acquisition, you had discussion of IEDs, you had the potential travel overseas. Really, you name it, you had it amongst these two networks.
Miller: And how are the networks connected?
Weiner: This is a classic case of what terrorism looks like in 2025, when you have social media enabling not just the radicalization, the consuming of propaganda, the echo chamber of driving people toward more and more extremist content and discussion, but active planning and coordination. But that wasn’t all you had, as outlined in the complaint against one of the defendants in New Jersey. Travel, real-life engagement and interaction between these groups of people. So these weren’t just aspirants talking about notional plans, they were actively coordinating.
Miller: What was the NYPD’s role in this case?
Weiner: NYPD worked extensively with (the) FBI on the New Jersey piece on the defendants and their potential overseas travel, and of course, we have officers assigned to our JTTF (Joint Terrorism Task Force) who support FBI field offices across the country, as well as human intelligence and open-source support from our intelligence division.
Miller: A long time ago, many people declared ISIS and al Qaeda effectively dead. You see something like this and you see something is coming back to life.
Weiner: So it never really went away, and since October 7, we’ve been contending with renewed interest in joining ISIS among inspired people here across the West, but also an increase in ISIS operational tempo overseas. The resurgence of potential increase in travel overseas, in this case Syria – we’ve also seen people more interested in traveling to Africa to join ISIS in Somalia – is a great concern.
Miller: What was the UK component here? You had people here talking to people there and other arrests that makes this beyond just the United States.
Weiner: So this is exactly the power of the internet comes to conventional terrorism activity. It’s quite easy to coordinate your travel or coordinate your attack plotting across different states, across different countries, in the era of the group chat, and that’s what we see in this case and that’s what we’re seeing in our cases more broadly.
Miller: How many of these people knew each other in real life versus met on these platforms?
Weiner: I think some of those questions are being answered as we speak. This is an ongoing investigation. But it was a combination of both, and that’s what makes it particularly potent and also gives us the urgency to do the disruption, not just the digital communication, but the physical as well, and frankly, it doesn’t even matter if they never met each other in person until they arrive overseas.
Miller: We’re seeing in these federal documents a range of people from basically 16 years old maybe to 20. Is ISIS particularly targeting young people?
Weiner: It’s that young people are increasingly drawn into extremism.
Miller: Why?
Weiner: That’s a lot of reasons, partly it’s the pandemic and the ongoing hangover from forced social isolation and a lot of time spent online. Partly it’s young people and their young brains just marinating in these online ecosystems where you’re subjected to, drawn to, consuming and then animated by extreme content. But one through line across all of our cases, regardless of ideology, is younger and younger people being drawn into these webs.
Miller: What’s the significance of all this?
Weiner: First and foremost, this is a job really well done by the FBI, working with other law enforcement agencies, by the NYPD, across the country in multiple cities and overseas. So this is exactly what we want our system to do. Second, it’s the complexity of this, the breadth of this, how many people involved and across so much space. That’s a good wakeup call, that conventional terrorism is unfortunately alive and well, and over the last year, we’ve been swept up in other threats, the rise in political violence and individual acts of really high-profile targeted violence with no clear ideological underpinning. That is a threat unto itself, but meanwhile, ISIS support, terrorism as we’ve understood and combated it for the last 24 years, remains a threat that we have to contend with.