I've heard similar stories from engineers going back to the days of mainframes and core memory. MiB's show up (or call or contact a manager) and say "you will use *this* algorithm in this piece of core system code," and then disappear again. Not second-hand stories either... once you hear enough of them you stop questioning whether it's happening and just assume everything is backdoored.
Some of the bigger players talk a good privacy game, but nobody says "no" to The Man.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
