Said government isn’t too keen on its own employees being vulnerable in this way, so it’s not as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

Hanlon’s razor applies here.

relevant lesser known fact - 3G crypto is broken. In such a way that is a bit suspicious - a couple terabyte-sized rainbow table will crack it.

I found a guy with the tables at one point, it's buried deep on the internet -- but this for example -- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6645525

There's no indication government is behind this and given that Google is rolling out tools now to protect against it this was probably always doable and just never prioritized.