"an increase that "far exceeded what we had anticipated" after the National Security Act was introduced in 2023" [far exceeded what we had anticipated]
The explicit admission that the volume surge 'far exceeded' expectations directly supports the structural claim that new legislation is exposing a previously undercounted threat landscape that outstrips institutional planning.
Reasoning from this article
When a new legal instrument causes investigative caseloads to exceed forecasts, it typically means the prior framework was suppressing detection rather than that the threat itself is new. This dynamic — legislation revealing latent activity — is a general pattern seen when countries introduce foreign-agent registration or national security acts, and it implies that the true scale of foreign interference in liberal democracies has been systematically underestimated.