A friend questioned my talking about monitoring the office network
Granted, monitoring the network seems counter to much of my opinion but it came down to this:
owner monitoring traffic; good.
outsider monitoring traffic; bad.
My employer knowing what bits are flowing around, in and out of the company network is good. Knowing the bits inside my own home network is good. The gov (and by proxy, my ISP) knowing what bits are flowing around the networks I manage without probable cause and a warrant with equal justification to a meat-space search and seizure warrant is not good. (don't even get me started on SOPA; it's previous incarnations and likelyhood of future incarnations attempts. The best government money can buy indeed.)
But, your question just becomes scary in terms of government. If the technology is in the private sector, it's been in the state sector already even if it has been limited to the intelligence services secret stash. Simply consider the fiasco that is the classic SSL certificate trust model; your browser will trust any traffic that the Chinese post office can re-route through it's MITM node. Heck, any government entity with more than a single 486 in it's home office will have a root level certificate or friendly CA it can rely on to sign whatever end certificate it likes.
With how broken the model is, I'm rather surprised at how slowly Convergence authenticating nodes have been popping up. On my last check, there was only four of them out available. (which reminds me that it's time to check in again.)
