I'm sorry, but this is FUD. I have at least two objections to what you say (for the record, I'm not american).
1. Do you really want to live in a society where a visit from the police means a busted door just in case? If things degenerated so badly, the police has already failed, and failed hard. I mean Rwanda/Congo hard.
2. Since we both know this is not the case, and most visits from the police are done in the old-fashioned knock-on-the door manner, we have to wander if a pimpled faced computer hacker has _any_ quality making him more dangerous then average. I suppose a bureaucrat might go and say hacking was an act of terrorism and terrorists use bombs, but for any sane person it's pretty clear he is not above average. He's scraping the bottom of the barrel, statistically speaking.
I therefore tend to conclude that the busting of the doors is uses as a deterrent. A message for the Anonymous that if you play with fire, you'll have FBI agents with guns in your room.
Re: 1, maybe I didn't make it clear enough in my original post, but indeed in general police do knock on the door, so I think we agree on this point - raids are the exception rather than the norm, but my point was that if there is any doubt at all whether or not a raid would have any advantages, then the raid option will be chosen over the knock-on-the-door option.
With this clear - re: 2, and in the specific case of computer crime, raids are SOP because suspects have a high probability of destroying evidence; at least here in the Netherlands (and policy here are, to put it mildly, not the Wild West type) this is the reason and practice. There have already been a number of cases where suspects (in child pornography cases) were literally forcefully pulled from behind a computer because they were deleting files as soon as they got wind of the police.
So yes, in case of computer crimes, entering with force does make sense (maybe not always - there have also been cases of 16 year olds where the police showed up when they were in school).
We don't know the real circumstances of these raids. Maybe there was a deterrent/revenge component (which would be illegal and undesirable), we don't know. Point is that the knee-jerk reaction(s) I was replying to are just that, and lacking any nuance. Many interests have to be weighed and safety of police officers and having a reasonable chance to save evidence are some of the factors that have to be weighed against the interests of the suspects. This may sound, in the limited context here, like I'm advocating a police state and anyone who knows me IRL knows that I usually am on the far opposite of that; but some force on entry is not a big a deal as some people make it out to be.
My (admittedly long-windedly made) point: no you're not being oppressed because the police put a hole in your door in the course of investigating your malicious disturbance of someone else's business.
1. Do you really want to live in a society where a visit from the police means a busted door just in case? If things degenerated so badly, the police has already failed, and failed hard. I mean Rwanda/Congo hard.
2. Since we both know this is not the case, and most visits from the police are done in the old-fashioned knock-on-the door manner, we have to wander if a pimpled faced computer hacker has _any_ quality making him more dangerous then average. I suppose a bureaucrat might go and say hacking was an act of terrorism and terrorists use bombs, but for any sane person it's pretty clear he is not above average. He's scraping the bottom of the barrel, statistically speaking.
I therefore tend to conclude that the busting of the doors is uses as a deterrent. A message for the Anonymous that if you play with fire, you'll have FBI agents with guns in your room.