As others have said it's not really about free speech. What a citizen is allowed to say in public isn't effected by this.

It's not anything particularly new either. Governments have always been pissed off by civil servants leaking things, and there have always been vindictive who rather than find the disgruntled employee and fire them, will lash out in the worst possible way and create more disgruntled employees.

What's changed is technology. Before someone had to tap explicit telephone's, someone had to listen to them. The journo's are just waking up to the fact that when the Australian government gave themselves the power to force the telco's to record the "meta data" about every phone call and web access and store it for two years, and granted themselves unlimited warrantless access to said data keeping your sources from the government became a little more difficult. Not a whole pile more difficult mind you - but you suddenly had to be computer savy. You had to know to use a mail provider out of Australia's jurisdiction. You had to use encrypted communications whose end points didn't reveal who you were talking to. It not complicated, and nothing that Wikileaks hasn't been doing for years, but it's definitely new.

Then we moved onto stage 2 - the Access and Assistance bill, in which the government gave themselves the power to force Microsoft / Google / Apple's / Facebooks of this world to silently install bugs on your phone / computer / tv. The raids being discussed by the article were covered by a warrant that specifically allowed them to delete and change data on the targets computers, which is decidedly weird when you think about it. [0] Surely they aren't planning to present data in court when there is a possibility they planted or modified it? Obviously that wasn't the intention. However replacing keyboard drivers and the like with something that does log data does require you to modify & delete data - so my guess is they were covering their arses. These seems to be little doubt they were planting bugs.

Avoiding the seeing eyes implanted by Assistance and Access bill is a damned sight harder than avoiding meta data collection. Again, not impossible - but now you have to avoid software that knows who you are. Software that is dispensed from centralised app stores that insist on identifying you and your device first is a definite no-go. Android is out, Apple is out, Microsoft is out. In fact most of the computing infrastructure they are comfortable with is out. Linux distributions are OK and open source communication apps like Signal are OK - but only those that have thought about and implemented evil maid protections.

It's all doable, and it's all cheap and once you do it you are even safer then you were pre Assistance and Access bill. But geeze you have to be really tech savy to get it right, and right now they are just waking up to the fact their lives and sources are an have been open book because they didn't do it.

As an aside, if this is the first time we've seen the Assistance and Access bill in action, it's poignant to note despite all the rhetoric of it being needed to keep Australian's safe from terrorists and paedophiles, it was in fact first use by the government against it's own citizens - public servants and journo's in this case.

[0] https://twitter.com/TheLyonsDen/status/1136126140882440193