Has this happened? Or did a U.S. government official slip up and admit the future intention publicly? (I wouldn't be surprised)
The only CA corruption I've heard of was a MOIS/VAJA operation against DigiNotar and a corporation overstepping its agreement with a CA by abusing a delegate root CA.
Did this play a role in the breach? Almost certainly it did not.
It seems pretty speculative to me that there's some large database with all of the mandated software backdoors and keys to get access to. And if it existed, I don't know that it would be such a large threat.
Certainly security bugs and professionals inside of industry are targeted by hackers already.
Given everything else, I don't know how large an issue this is (compared to say, hacking nuclear defense systems, energy grid, military C2C, etc).
It would be interesting to see whether this is considered a threat scenario by the USG.
You overestimate the competence of government agencies.
> Given everything else, I don't know how large an issue this is
A significantly large issue, seeing as it puts the safety of the vast majority of Americans at risk by exposing their personal information (everything from banking information to patient records to their precise movements).
> It would be interesting to see whether this is considered a threat scenario by the USG.
If it's not, then I've lost any sliver of confidence in the Feds that I might have had previously.
How fully do your think your threat model addresses the scope of national security concerns of the United States?