I like to call this the “dissident loophole”. What they really want to do is round up dissidents to protect the status quo, but punishing thought crime directly is just the right combination of unconstitutional and a bad look (though McCarthyism showed us we’re not always above that). So instead they will use social engineering to drag people over the line into minor acts of terrorism so they can be arrested, thus snuffing out future seeds of dissent.

You see this a lot in policing as well. Where people that seem “demographically criminal” to law enforcement are funneled into drug violations as an excuse to round up people they want to round up anyway.