As for certificates, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the NSA controls several root certificates and can exert legal pressure if not outright control of many others. They can use this power to perform SSL Man-in-the-Middle attacks. See http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/37216/how-likely..., https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/new_nsa_leak_... or https://digitalelf.net/2013/09/how-the-nsa-is-breaking-ssl/. I don't see how it can be remotely controversial that the US and its allies possess deeply asymmetric power. They have legal power over all popular desktop OSes, all popular mobile OSes, all major cloud providers (Amazon, Azure and Google) and most major social networks. To pretend that other countries have anything approaching this capability is patently ludicrous.