If by 'SWAT-like' you mean cops with guns, body armor, breaking down a door at first light, yes.
to collect on a debt?
Investigating fraud.
This is not a new thing - the police have been doing things like this for years now.
Fast entry makes sense if you have dangerous men, ready to shoot it out. But for white collar crime, when the suspects are known to be meek as lambs ... not so much.
If there is computer data, all it takes is a couple seconds for an industrious suspect to begin destroying evidence. MP5s or M4s would be totally unnecessary, but fast entry and pulling the power cords ASAP might be reasonable.
I'd have to be a judge and see their request for a warrant...
Most people are not hackers. If they've got evidence of wrong doing on their hard drive it's likely kept in Excel. Wipedisk - whazzat? I send my file to Recycle and it's gone, right?
If you think your suspect is going to execute a 'wipe disk' operation, then don't knock down their damn door, catch them when they're out and about and away from their computer.
Sigh. I'm tired of the internet, and its nonstop flow of stories which sound outrageous when you read the summary but rapidly sound a bit more sensible when you find out the details.
I'm not sure if sending S.W.A.T.-like team to "investigate" is sensible.
The U.S. managed to investigate things by sending detectives for a long time. Other countries seem to manage the policing without the need for equivalent of S.W.A.T.
S.W.A.T. teams are equivalent of Special Forces in Army. They are armed with extremely dangerous weapons and highly trained to kill. You're only supposed to send those people when there's a reasonable suspicions of armed resistance, not on routine investigation of white-collar crime, just because you can.
I've seen quite a bit of debate over whether the media is mischaracterizing what happened with the whole "SWAT-like teams" bit. Local law enforcement has said they didn't deploy any SWAT units, and, so far as I've been able to find, while the DoE OIG does own some shotguns[1], they don't have any real tactical teams.
Given the way the rest of this has been reported, it's kind of my suspicion that a bunch of investigators in "POLICE" raid jackets and a few shotguns got turned into a "SWAT team" by reporters.
Are there other details which still haven't been revealed? Was the dude a well-known organized crime figure? Was his home bristling with weapons? Had they already tried the sensible "knock on the door" method? I don't know. But I've been bitten enough times by important details left out of the story to make it more sensational that I'm disinclined to get too outraged over things I've read on the internet until I've heard both sides of the story.
Still, I would be worried simply because they could get a warrant without going to the court, and them having their own law enforcement forces... Isn't the police enough?
