But what should I use if I am a politician and fundamentally believe that the government should be able to read my communications?
I know this will never happen in real life but I think this is the only way to solve the problem of corrupt officials and revolving doors / lobbyist problems.
Edit: the book "Haze" by L.E. Modesitt Jr. has a good take on this.
Nothing stops you from explicitly publishing your communications. And whether you do it explicitly, or implicitly by using an insecure communication method, it's always a choice which you can revoke at any time.
It looks like the replies to this comment misunderstand the point.
It's not about one person choosing to make their communication public, but that there should be a record of government communication period. Have we not seen enough examples of our elected officials corruption in media that isn't encrypted? Now we want them to be able to communicate in all manner with no accountability?
I think you misunderstood my point, which was that they can always do that. You can't stop them from using Signal, if they want to do something nefarious. Hell, they can just meet in a dark alley if they want. Sure, you can make it against the rules, but we are already presupposing rule-breaking (or else we would not need oversight).
So, if there's going to be some kind of disclosure system, let's make it structured and explicit. Just requesting that they use unencrypted communications, and then having some sort of unaccountable gray-hat institution (i.e. intelligence services) snoop on those communications, is a bad system.
Interestingly, the EU's position on this looks really confused. SMS messages should (in theory) only transit their own local telcos. The USA doesn't get a look-in unless it hacks the telcos themselves.
What the EU is doing here is routing all Commission traffic through US based server farms and roots of trust. The phones are controlled from the USA, the comms services are too. So their own local firms can no longer see the traffic but US firms can (Signal claim this isn't the case but people are wising up to the fact that this can't be true until more infrastructure is in place).
What actual threat are they trying to block here?
A large powerful country ruled by a megalomaniac who has proved he isn't afraid to ruin his country's reputation by abusing his power.
Consider, the Signal threat model assumes that you can't trust telcos. That's usually based on the assumption that you're some ordinary grassroots citizen who might be spied on by the government. But the EU Commission is the government. It seems a bit odd for them to implicitly assert the national European telecoms companies are untrustworthy.