they could sell their keys, but impersonations would likely be spotted thanks to certificate transparency
NSA could still mount an attack by asking the CA to register NSA's certs as valid, and tamper the victim's network connection. What makes certs secure is our trust in certificate authorities.
Would that allow transparent sniffing of traffic encrypted with these certs?
If an attacker has the CA's private key, then the attacker can mint new HTTPS certificates. They wouldn't be able to do passive listening attacks on connections, but they could use an active man-in-the-middle attack to swap out the server's certificate in the connection. However, this attack could be detected through Certificate Transparency, and the CA's leaked keys would become untrusted by browsers.