If these guys have any decent encryption on the hard drive, taking it out is just a start on a long road in the lab. Your average local law enforcement agency is not going to break that encryption.
I think the idea is, that anyone who's smart enough to use encryption is probably not going to fall under local jurisdiction. The locals are probably only going to be taking care of common identity thieves or the casual internet predator, who probably aren't going to have a high operational level of computer knowledge.
