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.