The CA doesn't have anything that helps you do Lawful Intercept. They just vouch for people's identities.

If you can persuade them to fraudulently vouch for your agency as being some other subscriber then this unavoidably produces a smoking gun which everybody can see, just like when Israel produces fake passports so its agents can travel abroad to murder people.

It doesn't let them passively intercept. The CA could not, gun to its head, help you do that. The mathematics just doesn't work that way, any more than the US Federal Reserve could intervene to make three dollars twice as many as five dollars.

That paper is from April 2010 which is a different age in terms of internet encryption. Just for comparison, Google only started offering an encrypted version of its service in May 2010: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely...

They quickly realized the problems that you describe. In Nov 2011, the Certificate Transparency project by Google had its initial commit: https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency/commit/6a...

In Chrome they have since enforced CT compliance for certificates: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/ct-poli...

CT requires that each certificate issued needs to be contained in both a Google log and a non-Google log: https://github.com/chromium/ct-policy/blob/master/ct_policy....

This means that fradulently issued certificates either won't work, or will be contained in public logs run by Google (or Google needs to be forced by authorities as well).