This does come at a cost of performance, energy efficiency, high price, etc, but DoD / homeland security offices (or their equivalents) are ready to tolerate it.
Same applies to OSes, but mature open-source OSes are several.
You are also talking about defense politics, i.e. the military sector. That and the secret service sector is not covered at all by EU legislation and EU executive.
Also, I don't see why after looking at interests banning Intel from doing so would be advisable. Most relevant EU countries have close cooperation with the US in the military and secret service sectors.
That said, defence ministers usually don't outlaw things. It would be the parliaments. And EU law might actually hinder them from doing so, given that it first and foremost focuses on enforcing open competition and free flow of goods.
The important EU states certainly have the same back door access or a 'trusted' means of disabling it.
Freedom is for the powerful and important, not the pish posh tax slaves these Grace's fatten themselves upon.
Can't find source for this, but a few months ago I read that US (NSA, CIA) and EU (BND) agencies get the same Intel CPU WITHOUT IME, even more NSA made it a requirement for Intel that IME must be completely removed.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/researchers-say-intels-manageme...
I've not tested it, but it looks like you flip a bit and it all goes away. Well, slightly more complicated but that's the gist of it.
With this out of the way, here's the TL;DR: like most corporations executives, the fundamental goal of most officials in place isn't to conduct their mission/mandate but to further their own power; two motivations which ideally go together but in actual fact seldom do. Only the illusion of the former is actually necessary to achieve the latter.
I won't elaborate much because this view amounts to a borderline revolutionary thesis of sorts (calling for a new kind of regime, in place of the disingenuously called "representative democracy"). It's interesting but it's a book, not a comment.
Just recall history and ask questions about:
- The subtle and yet vast spectrum of 'corruption': where does it begins, how far it goes, even after every involved party has died?
- The illusion of safety or 'acceptable' conduct that officials (or execs) can convince themselves of, regarding their organization and themselves: how cognitively biased can human beings be, paradoxically increasingly so as the stakes go higher?
- When we could predict with reasonable confidence that things could go very wrong very fast, did we always manage to prevent just that from happening? Did we even try to the best of our then-capabilities? (Don't even go Godwin on that, not even wars, think market crash or viruses).
- How often in history do we need, as whole societies, the lessons of examples and dire consequences before we put our act together? What is the limbic value of 'could' versus 'hasn't yet'?
Once you realize, as I did some time ago, that we are much less rational beings than anything else, every mind-blowing decision you've witnessed in your own life by people who should have known better becomes not just possible but likely and even understandable, if not outright predictable.
My personal contention is that we'll basically need to go through a 'black swan' of sorts to really deeply learn about electronic safety; much like knowing about germs and viruses did not automatically provoked decent health procedures even by health professionals, let alone the public. But now we do wash hands and sanitize rooms. Just consider how hard a lesson it's been to learn for humanity.
We are in the infancy of the electronic age; I'm afraid it will get worse before it gets better. I just hope it will take the form of a temporally 'short' catastrophy rather than a whole new medieval age of sorts, "dark ages" as seen from a hypothetical future; but the more I observe human beings today, the less confident I feel about us taking the high road directly. Especially when lives are threatened not clinically but rather socially and psychologically. Our survival instincts tend to be numbed when life/reproduction isn't directly threatened.
At this point you may go Orwellian because it's almost less frightening than what's potentially facing some of us on this planet, and our societies appear to be both very resilient yet very susceptible to flaws (probably goes hand in hand). And when there's a flaw... be it legal, psychological, or otherwise... you know someone someday will exploit it. Circumstancial aspects like this ME merely serve as paths to what will eventually become history, but alas it's almost impossible to predict which particular aspect will be the trigger, as impossible as it is to shield ourselves from all angles. But whatever, it too, shall pass.
This isn't to say we can't mitigate because we absolutely can and should (I do try personally), but we can't really alter the shape of things to come because it would amount to changing human nature before the fact. Never happened in history. I don't think evolution works like that, period. Sorry for taking the discussion into a rather philosophical light, but that is my best answer to the 'whys' you asked and seem concerned about —concerns that I share but fail to astonish me nowadays.
Oh, we are incredibly diverse and adaptable. It matters very little that almost all of us are wrong, until it becomes "absolutely all".
I just hope that black swan happens before we start directly plugging our brains into the network. If it does, I am confident we will be fine after a few decades.
Of course, there is no specificity to the EU here -- this applies to Russia, China and other countries too.
Edit: maybe Intel is already eligible to a € multiple Billions fine from the EU based on this? (Disclaimer: I have no clue about how such fine works).