Their plan depended on preserving the secrecy of the selfish sovereign surveillance architecture.
TC possibly provides the robust user and device identity within the broad surveillance architecture, while seeming to offer privacy to end users. Trust us. We guarantee to abuse your trust.
If so, it's grotesque. Targeting under the umbrella of a legal standard of suspicion isn't so bothersome.
But global surveillance by NSA using a back door in TC is something different. The existence of a back door (or an MS front door) would make the whole thing fairly useless.