Thank you! It winds me up so much when people parrot that claim.

Telegram is encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest on their servers. At no point is any data stored or transmitted without encryption. Whether you believe their claims of never giving out encryption keys is another matter.

My view is that if the feds wanted my chat logs that badly they wouldn’t go after Telegram, they’d go after me and my device directly, and at that point all bets are off.