[qb45]

> That's a bit contradictory, why would manufacturers be willing to let themselves get subverted to make less-secure products, but not to make more secure products?

I know that's not exactly what you meant, but allegedly China requires some Western products sold there to have backdoors. I heard reasonably reliable rumors about one specific case, here's some general article to prove I'm not completely talking out of my ass:

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2331257/lan-wan/encrypti...

> Especially considering how security is a big part of the business for quite a few of these companies, like CISCO's firewalls.

Funny that you mention firewalls, a year ago it was discovered that some Juniper firewalls and VPN gateways had a covert master password and an advanced crypto backdoor allowing decryption of the VPN traffic IIRC.

Juniper denied knowledge of this backdoor and it's possible that this wasn't NSA's job at all because it involved the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm to which they are believed to have a backdoor baked in the standard. But this means that somebody managed to hack them (and specifically their precious security products).