Besides the real reason? I dunno.
Why would Intel go through all the trouble of creating ME or the broke AMD PSP at around the same time? This is hardwired in silicon, is not cheap to do and definitely needs huge business justification to initiate, implement and maintain. What's the business case?
Are they charging a premium for these features and disabling it for everyone else as they would if it was actually a 'premium' feature? Are they giving an option to those who don't want it to disable it without ado?
No, they are pushing it on everyone. That itself compromises ME. How do we know there is no NSL in effect forcing both Intel and AMD to implement this. Nobody does. But it is an intrusive piece of tech that has complete authority over your PC.
Yes, the NSA exists. Yes, it's their job to spy on people. And yes, it's perfectly valid to include mass surveillance in your threat model. But these constant, uncorroborated claims that the NSA boogeyman is hiding behind every rock and tree are starting to become quite tiresome.
Yeah indeed, they have backdoor-ed every ISP, nation, router, HDD, what-have-you in existence and these people keep telling boogeyman tales.
Tsk tsk tsk. How tiresome.
This is exactly the kind of hyperbolic nonsense I'm talking about. You can't claim that every HDD in existence has an NSA-installed backdoor installed in it without providing any evidence.
If the NSA's capabilities were nearly as extensive as you're claiming, the US wouldn't need to bother maintaining a military. They could just remotely command all of North Korea's computers to shut themselves off, then sit back and wait around for their surrender.
I'm not saying mass surveillance isn't a problem, or even that the NSA doesn't have a backdoor installed in IME (I certainly don't have evidence to the contrary); just that people need to stop exaggerating the threat, or making claims about the NSA having compromised any specific system without providing any evidence to back those claims up.
Remember when the US shut down NK's internet ? https://gizmodo.com/so-who-shut-down-north-koreas-internet-1...
Remember when the NSA was revealed to have a malware that could infect hard drives, being potentially undetectable ? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwkwk/the-nsas-u...
Remember PRISM ? How about stuxnet, and the other couple of viruses that are almost surely the NSA's.
Sure, those are not backdoors installed by the OEM, rather they are malware that the NSA can use to infect (lots of) systems. But let's not kid ourselves, the NSA does have a ridiculous amount of power, and we have lots of evidence of it.
At this point I'd be rather surprised if the NSA haven't hacked my fridge yet somehow.
_Could_ the NSA have the ability to utilize IME somehow as a means to infect computers? Certainly. Do they _actually_ have that capability? We have no idea. Same goes for your motherboard's firmware, your hard drive's hardware, and any number of other possible vectors. They _could_ be compromised somehow, yes, but let's not claim that any specific motherboard firmware, HDD model, or CPU processor brand definitely _is_ compromised without evidence.
There is an equivalent article from Ars technica, if "theregister" isn't to your liking.
As for the evidence on routers and Internet infrastructure, you should pay more attention to leaks of state-sponsored tools, like the equation group leaks and the CIA one.
Do you want to live in a free society or not? Because this is not acceptable to a free society.
The fact of secrecy around this issue is the only thing to be doubted. Its no secret to non-Americans/concerned citizens; if you choose to continue to be ignorant, I choose to set you the challenge: go and find out for yourself just how bad it really is with the NSA. (It is atrocious.)
If I were an American and believed in what the NSA was doing, I'd want to know what they were doing with their budget if they didn't at least try to get a hardware back door into Intel CPUs. Why waste budget on finding exploits in patchable software when they can go straight to the silicon?
The Intel IME is far different than 'rock and tree' to an organization of 40k employees and $10B budget tasked with bypassing stuff like the IME.
Well, some companies and users use the IME to enable theft-prevention technology. If you can circumvent the IME, you can easily steal a laptop and disable this theft-prevention technology.
If that’s worth building an ever more closed walled garden is another question.
Isn't the ability to spy on everyone the official mandate of the NSA?
What would be the justification for Intel going through all that trouble to do that (besides a conspiratorial "the NSA needs it to spy on everyone")?
The impression I've gotten, to this point, is that Intel just doesn't care enough about people in the general public who are bothered by the IME to publicly support ways to disable it. Governments had enough buying-power to get Intel to implement an unsupported workaround, but I'm not convinced Intel has a motivation to make accessing that workaround hard.