Buying and selling root certificates

Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:

> The feds clearly have the power to get through or around encryption

I have a hard time believing this...

So what do they do? Send a team in to retrieve the key from your
system? Borrow some CPU time from the NSA?

In the Scarfo case (a small-time Tony Soprano type) they did
multiple black-bag entries to put a keysnatcher on his laptop.

<http://www.epic.org/crypto/scarfo.html&gt;