I'd be very surprised if Symantec doesn't have some backroom deal with intelligence agencies, and not just in the U.S. either, especially since they've acquired BlueCoat - a "security company" known for selling surveillance tools to authoritarian regimes - and after they made the BlueCoat CEO the CEO of Symantec.
Interesting that it would be "so much easier" for the U.S. intelligence community to steal most certificates or work around TLS, when countries like Thailand, which have much fewer resources, prefer to get Microsoft to install their own root certificate for them in Windows. Perhaps this is what the IC meant as well, when it said there are other easier ways? Why bother with Verisign's solution, when they could have their own root certs in Windows?
