> All large corporations weaken encryption for the government
This is simply false. It is untrue to claim that all U.S. companies have somehow "weakened" encryption or inserted backdoors in their products for the Feds. I normally wouldn't waste my time correcting conspiracy theories, but sometimes it's necessary to stop the more credulous from believing them.
Yes, the NSA has boasted of having a surveillance "partnership" with certain U.S. companies, but those are telecommunications carriers -- AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc., not Silicon Valley firms: http://www.cnet.com/news/surveillance-partnership-between-ns....
For an additional indictment of AT&T, look at the sworn affidavit that EFF obtained from local SF bay area whistleblower Mark Klein -- an AT&T technician who revealed the existence of the NSA's fiber taps at the 2nd & Folsom Street SF facility.
But the Silicon Valley companies that we know and more-or-less love have done the opposite. Look at the announcements about device encryption by Google and Apple in the last month (that have irked the Feds so much they're threatening new laws). Look at Google's Adam Langley, Wan-Teh Chang, Ben Laurie, and Elie Bursztein deploying a better TLS cipher suite in Chrome. Look at Twitter's surveillance lawsuit this week against the Feds over, apparently, the legality of a warrant canary.
And of course the two links in the conspiracy theory posted above prove the opposite of the "weaken encryption" claim. First, CALEA doesn't apply to web companies. And even the carriers it does apply to are permitted to (at 47 USC 1002(b)(3)) provide secure end-to-end encryption: "A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication."
Second, the FOIA'd doc was written in the late 1990s before the Feds liberalized encryption export controls. It's 15+ years out of date. You can now freely export strong crypto. And even in the dark days of the 1990s, there were no domestic controls on encryption use, though the TLAs did give it a shot at one point.
A better argument for the conspiracy theory set is the very odd relationship between EMC Corporation's RSA business unit and NSA. But even if allegations of intentional security flaws are true, EMC is a Massachusetts company, not a left coast firm, and a cozy relationship between the NSA and EMC/AT&T/VZ/etc. certainly does not indict all companies and their founders.