This isn’t a what-if. It has been verified that the government has been using National Security Letters to force companies to compromise their systems and to not tell anyone that they’ve been ordered to do so (to the tune of people within the company not directly involved with the order don’t even know). See all the stories about this in regards to the Internet Archive, which challenged their letter (this rarely happens) and spoke about it:
https://www.aclu.org/national-security/internet-archives-nsl-challenge
