Depends. Some governments (hello China) may indeed do such a thing but if you have such drastic steps taken against you then your SSL certificate is probably th

Depends. Some governments (hello China) may indeed do such a thing but if you have such drastic steps taken against you then your SSL certificate is probably the least of your worries. I'm not saying that this solution would be perfect and yes, most governments don't exactly have a flawless track record of managing, well, anything. But no matter how screwed an actual implementation would end up - it can't get much worse than what we have now. Admittedly a government has relatively little motivation to make SSL good. But even that is still better than what we have today with the commercial CAs - those have a strong and frequently proven motivation to make SSL worse!