You would think that, but cell carriers have been found to retain both plaintext and encrypted traffic for several years in some cases: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vqkv/how-fbi-gets-phone-da...

Cell carriers aren't a bastion of end to end encryption, the tech just can't do it.

That's why you use them just as dumb pipes forwarding encrypted data traffic from one place to another.

No SMS, no phone calls if you can avoid it.

Speaking of tech, has anyone ever independently audited Apple's encrypted infrastructure a-la what they're promising for Private Compute? I'm unconvinced that the government couldn't crack that if they wanted.