I think this starts to not work when you start to include other states that want to do this, other countries, cities, counties, etc.. How many trusted authorities should there be and how do you prevent them from being compromised and exploited to falsely verify people? How do you prevent valid certs from being sold?
Some examples of the type of service you mentioned:
The features of online backup is an online service, you can't typically just "crack" that. You'd have to reverse engineer the protocol and put a server in between that you control.
Taking an hour doesn't sound right. Is it a disk or solid state? Do you have an unusual amount of directory hierarchy?
If you have a disk, does it have SMARTT errors reported?
Which filesystem are you using?