"Behind" would assume there's someone else out there that's ahead. The state of the art of device security just isn't there yet for these kinds of compromises t

"Behind" would assume there's someone else out there that's ahead. The state of the art of device security just isn't there yet for these kinds of compromises to be available to just any cop or agency. Now, assuredly there's people out there that support field operations that could study the individual device and then exploit it given X number of days. To go from there to assume that USG can undetectably compromise most, or even a large enough subset of devices, is paranoid. The scale of that problem is much larger. USG focuses on backdooring crypto for this reason. Much easier to compromise a few algorithms than it is to backdoor every device.