Are you sure? How would you know? We can't know how many people the government blackmails with data taken from their iphones, because it's illegal to publish information about them doing so, whereas ransomware attacks are widely publicised.
I would counter the “government blackmailing people” by questioning the risk this poses to me as an individual. As much as we’d like to imagine it, and as much as it can often times feel like it, we don’t live in a Kafkaesque society, by and large, as the significant majority of us are of zero interest and have little of anything worth blackmailing.
Of course. But you shouldn't have to spill your guts about your entire life (I understand that young folk nowadays life their lives in Instagram selfies).
And more to the point, the first step for the policemen investigating a rape complaint should be to investigate the complaint, not the complainant. If the investigation of the complaint raises questions about the complainant, then there might be grounds for seizing the complainant's device. But they can't make device seizure a pre-requisite for doing their job.
Not the police!
Which government? What level? My god, who told you this thing? For what other crimes is this policy enforced?