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The charges against the Massachusetts man were not the first time the Miller family has raised concerns about its security.

Although authorities did not identify Proia’s target by name, describing her in a news release only as a “former political adviser and prominent member of the Republican Party,” two people familiar with the matter confirmed the alleged target was Katie Miller.

Prosecutors said Proia used an ever-changing series of phone numbers to contact Katie Miller at all hours, often using expletives and vulgar language to criticize her and her husband.

“The defendant repeatedly and relentlessly targeted the victim, her husband and her family with deeply disturbing communications that profoundly disrupted their lives,” said Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts.

Proia was arrested Thursday by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and was released after an initial appearance in federal court. His attorney did not immediately return requests for comment.

Katie Miller thanked Foley, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and the FBI’s Washington field office in a post to social media about the arrest.

Proia’s indictment follows days of internal Justice Department debate over the case. Last week, the FBI transferred the top two agents running the counterterrorism division of its Washington field office over dissatisfaction with what higher-ups deemed to be the slow pace of their investigation into the threats against Katie Miller, The Washington Post has reported.

As President Donald Trump’s policies — including an immigration enforcement crackdown in which Stephen Miller has played a prominent role — have provoked fierce opposition across the country, the administration has prioritized prosecuting people who threaten public officials, federal agents and judges. Administration officials have pointed to recent high-profile incidents of political violence, like the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last year, to justify their heightened vigilance.

In some cases, those threats have prompted indisputably serious concerns from federal investigators that the perpetrator intends to commit an violent acts.

But in many others, defense attorneys have objected to the Justice Department’s decision to label threatening messages “domestic terrorism” and questioned its expanding definition of what constitutes a threat worthy of federal prosecution instead of one better left to local authorities.

Several defendants who have been charged in recent months are accused of little more than making vaguely menacing posts online, with little evidence to suggest they had any intent or ability to act on those alleged threats.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department charged former FBI director James B. Comey with threatening the president’s life after he posted a photo to social media depicting seashells spelling out “86 47.” Trump is the 47th president and “86” can mean to get rid of someone. Prosecutors say it is also mob slang for killing someone.

Comey maintains he did not create the shell arrangement and had no idea it could be read as a threat.

But unlike Comey and others who have been charged under a statute that prohibits communicating interstate threats — which requires prosecutors to prove the message contained a threat of injury or violence — Proia was indicted under a cyberstalking statute that requires only proof that the defendant intended to harass their victim and attempted to cause substantial emotional distress.

Prosecutors said Thursday that the relentless nature of Proia’s alleged communications instilled “real fear and harm.” In one message, cited by authorities, he purportedly contacted Katie Miller’s parents referring to Stephen Miller as a “Jewish Nazi/white supremacist.”

“Did you raise her to be trash or did that just happen naturally?” Proia allegedly texted them.

The Millers have emerged as frequent targets. Last year, the couple and their children moved to housing at a secure military facility, citing concern for their personal safety following protests in the Arlington neighborhood where they were previously residing.

Local activists posted fliers disclosing their home address and scrawled messages on sidewalks in chalk accusing Stephen Miller — the architect of controversial White House policies on immigration enforcement and domestic terrorism — of “destroying democracy.”

“If we don’t step up and start putting people in cuffs for these actions, what comes next?” Katie Miller asked in a Fox News interview shortly afterward.

In May, Virginia prosecutors declined to bring a case against Barbara Wien, a retired peace studies professor, who was involved in those protests, saying she was “not likely to be found guilty and her speech [was] likely to be found constitutionally protected.”

The FBI’s Washington field office was also involved in that investigation, but to date no federal charges have been filed.

Perry Stein contributed to this report.

In a video posted on social media, the assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, Brett Leatherman, vowed Tuesday to hunt down the members of a cybercriminal group going by the name of ShinyHunters, the same group that last week claimed to steal reams of sensitive data from the FBI itself.

"You know how to find us, and we know how to find you," Leatherman said in the video, encouraging the prolific group of loosely connected data extortionists to come forward and share information or face the consequences. "I suggest you reach out first while the choice is still yours."

The FBI says it is "aggressively" investigating the breach and how hackers got ahold of sensitive FBI employment information, including whether the hackers got into third-party software or the FBI's own internal systems. In a statement emailed to NPR, a FBI spokesperson said the bureau is working "around the clock to investigate the cyber incident involving FBIJobs.gov and is in regular communication with anyone who may be impacted."

It's still unclear how much information was stolen, though media organizations and threat intelligence researchers have already verified the authenticity of some of the stolen materials. Meanwhile, a defacement message was posted on the FBI's jobs website late last week where ShinyHunters took credit for the attack, and the site was temporarily taken down.

Current and former FBI employees familiar with the matter, who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisal for speaking about an ongoing investigation, said many employees first found out about the breach from media reports. They suggested there could be as many as several terabytes of text files in the data tranche, including FBI job applications, details on promotions, information on sensitive job postings, family details, medical data and more. Those same employees, particularly those who have retired, say there's growing frustration with FBI leadership, including FBI Director Kash Patel, about the lack of communication about the breach, exactly who is impacted, and how the FBI plans to protect its current and former employees. Some retired employees who worked undercover might need protection services like relocation assistance or even name changes if their data is exposed publicly.

The FBI told NPR it sent multiple "bureau wide communications within 24 hours of public reporting" of the breach" and that "the FBI treats the security of its own information and the safety of its workforce as top priorities."

One former senior FBI official told NPR the breach could be on par with the 2015 compromise of tens of millions of sensitive government employee records from the Office of Personnel Management. The U.S. government attributed that breach to the Chinese government and described it as a widespread espionage operation designed to identify potential targets for intelligence gathering.

However, unlike the OPM breach, there is more concern in this instance that the stolen materials will fall into the wrong hands or be otherwise weaponized, either by ShinyHunters or any number of criminal, terrorist, or nation-state organizations seeking to pilfer the stolen files. ShinyHunters has come out and said it never intended to leak the files, despite giving a deadline of Sept. 30 for the FBI to amend previously published press releases about the group that it argued were inaccurate, but that doesn't necessarily prevent further theft or exploitation of the data.

The bureau and its former employees are "bracing for impact" and assume that the stolen materials may be irretrievably compromised, according to the former senior FBI official.

But experts argue that the ShinyHunters members, which many threat intelligence researchers have previously identified as a loose collective of young hackers around the world, should also brace themselves for the FBI's response.

Cynthia Kaiser, the former FBI deputy director of the cyber division who currently leads ransomware research at cybersecurity company Halcyon, described the hackers as "reckless" for targeting the FBI, particularly knowing the FBI has a clear policy of not paying a ransom or negotiating with criminal actors. "When any threat actor targets the FBI directly, they should expect that the FBI is going to marshall additional resources to bring them quickly to justice," she wrote in a social media post.

While the FBI has promised to seek the information to make arrests against ShinyHunters hackers in the wake of this breach, it's unclear how imminent those actions might be.

The FBI's video posted on social media also featured a recently announced arrest of one alleged member of ShinyHunters in Amsterdam by the Dutch National Police, an operation the FBI thanked its Dutch partners for leading. However, that arrest preceded the ShinyHunters theft of FBI personnel data, according to the former senior FBI official familiar with the matter. It's unclear if that arrest served as motivation for the breach of FBI data and whether there was concern about potential retaliation following that arrest.

While the FBI has not shared any technical details about how the hackers got into its systems, Google's Mandiant published new research revealing that ShinyHunters is currently targeting a vulnerability in a human resources software tool called PeopleSoft, which is owned by tech giant Oracle. PeopleSoft is a tool used by the FBI, among other major clients in IT services, corporations, government, academia and beyond.

Google originally disclosed information about the vulnerability and its exploitation in June and revealed that while the company released a patch, some customers instead implemented protections like a firewall to attempt to prevent bad actors from exploiting it. Ultimately, ShinyHunters has managed to easily bypass those controls.