[ancientworldnow]

I believe it's far more likely that the US government does like signal is the same reason as Tor. It's not about data collection (though technically possible it requires essentially destroying the trust in the service to achieve), it's about providing a tool useful for foreign dissidents and regime change that aligns to US interests.

Signal and Tor are statecraft and espionage tools not surveillance honeypots (though they both could become the latter through extreme means). This value far outweighs the ability to gather even more data when everyone is already surrendering huge amounts anyway.