ALBANY, Aug. 21 -- Five trips to the target. A hardware store run funded by the FBI. Thirty-five days of documented planning with undercover agents she believed were Islamic State facilitators.

By the time federal investigators arrested Jessica Bowie on Wednesday, the 35-year-old Albany woman had assembled an operational record that distinguishes her case from the online-rhetoric-and-arrest pattern that has defined many domestic ISIS prosecutions in recent years.

Bowie faces a single federal charge of attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Prosecutors in the Northern District of New York announced the arrest on August 20, describing a seven-week investigation in which FBI confidential sour...