There’s a meme that every person has a U.S. government agent assigned to read their text messages. That’s not true. But government agencies, from the National Security Administration to local police departments, can potentially read the conversations on many text messaging applications. Fortunately, this is not always the case, and there are many ways you can protect your privacy.
You can’t self host SMS or telephony voice. All of your clients contain proprietary code and zero days that could easily be exploited by a state actor.
If you ever go completely radio silent, then you’re more likely to be manually investigated as you are a statistical anomaly to the mass surveillance algorithms.