> I value my privacy and my freedom, but honestly I think that as an Australian the Australian Government does have the right to be able to access my devices during an investigation, provided their are appropriate checks and balances involved. Just like if I had a safe in my house, they have the right to get it opened with a search warrant. If I refuse to open the safe, they have methods and tools that allow opening it. I fail to see what makes iPhones any different from a safe conceptually.
Warning: you are relying on analogies to pre-digital technology to make sense of digital technology.
I'll try a lightning round in ten minutes:
1. A physical safe generally must be physically opened by officers coming to your location and opening it. Typically a warrant is served to the person who owns the safe, who then reads it, and can often watch the officers physically enter their property and possibly even watch them open the physical safe using the combination they give to the officers. After the officers leave the person can have the lock changed with a fair amount of certainty that the officers didn't change the physical makeup of the safe in such a way that they can remotely access the contents of the physical safe in the future.
2. Under certain circumstances officers could access the safe without the person present. But, generally, they have to physically enter to the person's dwelling to do that. Neighbors may see them enter because officers are conspicuous physical objects that travel well below the speed of light.
3. Officers can compel people to open the safes under certain circumstances. But some safes are expensive often because their design makes it difficult to open them without the key. I'm unaware of previous situations where law enforcement made a public awareness campaign about the difficulty of opening expensive safes under the rare circumstances that such safes held vital evidence to time-critical investigations. I'd love to read about such a campaign of "Our Safes Going Dark" if you have a reference to such a campaign.
4. Law enforcement cannot outsource the physical opening of safes to an Italian safe-opening company that installs proprietary software at the station that allows the officers to do remote and clandestine opening of many types of physical safes. (Where remote means opening and viewing the contents of the safe without having to dispatch a physical officer to a physical location.)
5. Law enforcement cannot leverage the same type of Italian safe-opening techniques in an automated system that checks the metadata coming across the internet for certain selectors and then automatically and secretly opens certain safes, storing pictures of contents of those safes for later perusal or even changing the substance of the safe so that the safe itself will report certain data back to law enforcement just in case it turns out this safe belongs to someone who turns out to be a criminal.
6. Nation states could not indiscriminately store the data about the sum total of all the places you traveled and people you interacted with on your way to and from the safe, store that data about you, and then redefine the word collection to mean what happens when someone reads one or more of the pieces of data that were collected.
Bonus
7. If nation state #1 wants to embarass nation state #2 by releasing some of state 1's secrets, those secrets cannot easily be leveraged to make digital ransomware appear on a large number of safes of nation state #3.
Essentially, everything I can think of in ten minutes that is important about digital security/privacy/surveillance is lost when you use analogies to physical pre-digital objects.