Yep, physical access = game over. A tale as old as time. It doesn't matter who etched the silicon.

Telegram supposedly gets around this by distributing keys over various regions.

But surely intel services are smart enough to get people in there illegally.

90% of Telegram chats live in cleartext on their servers; no one would need to go to those lengths to get chat data from them.

	▲	rednb 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Telegram chats not being end-to-end crypted are encrypted at rest on their servers. In this case telegram definitely controls the encryption keys but distributes them across jurisdictions to mitigate some risks.