Your theory in the above comment is that the NSA or equivalent ordered Intel to build a C&C mechanism into their processors. Intel then did a perfect job covering up this request, but did a piss poor job of implementing it due to incompetence and has not managed to correct it for 10 years. There is no indication that this might be the case but because of other unsavory activities by the NSA or equivalent it can be assumed that at some point evidence will be uncovered that you are right and therefore we should accept it as fact. Do I have that right?
Judging by other activities of the intelligence agencies and working with pure speculation -- not hiding from these words, you are correct by calling it that -- I still think it's much more likely they commissioned the Intel ME.
You mention critical thinking in another comment. Critical thinking, the way I apply it, also requires a historical context to be applied to the situation one is analyzing. Agencies have been doing pretty shady stuff and some of it has been uncovered for the entire world to see.
Critical thinking, the way I apply it, says that the odds are there is a foul play. I merely wish you to recognize that this is the more likely scenario than a bunch of coincidences and/or people supposedly making the ME to serve data center sysadmins -- btw many of those sysadmins, including on several threads here in HN, said they never used the ME and named a plethora of other tools.
Obviously I am not trying to change the way you think in general. I believe we can both agree that none of us knows for sure. The human brain's strength is to work with many variables and be able to impose some order in the chaos by pattern recognition and using historical info. I am not gonna deny this can lead to people drawing awfully misguided conclusions sometimes -- and I've been guilty of that as well! -- but it's the best we have, especially having in mind what tiny imperfect brains we have to work with.
Everything I can name are circumstantial evidence. I accept that. It's the nature of the area. Intelligence data isn't easy to come by.
And I am saying that the confidence interval on that calculation is just orders of magnitude not tight enough. I am not denying that you could be right. It's just that I am giving that possibility something like a 1% chance of being true, while something like 85% chance of this being pure incompetence by Intel management and engineers (the rest being some other explanation that's neither malice nor direct incompetence). I don't think you and I can find a common ground on this estimation.
Again though, ME is a bad thing because it's not open source, it can't be turned of, and it's buggy. Regardless of who ordered its creation, it sucks.
You're also saying, implicitly, that therefore we must default to assuming it is incompetence.
That link isn't a given. Stating that it is incompetence is also speculation, not some kind of universal backup truth.
However, when it comes to that last 5%, I assert that the historical data does not back a claim that Intel's marketing department is incompetent.
Why aren't you viewing the possibility of intelligence agencies ordering the Intel ME as one of these future historical facts? If the proof for that became known today, both the agency and Intel would scramble to introduce a better backdoor in the next generation CPUs / MBs and devise a marketing campaign to make it sound good -- and to bash their former selves for "making a mistake" while simply thinking "OK, we're gonna cover it up much better this time and we're gonna twist it in such a way that people would flock to buy it". It's what marketing and spies do; they twist facts. Why is that so non-legit for you?
Furthermore, you're asking why didn't they do a better job if it was a conspiracy. People in closed circles aren't exposed to public criticism and their thinking is affected in the process. They usually think "meh, good enough, nobody will ever find it anyway". They are humans like you and I and are susceptible to bad days or negligence due to being tired. Furthermore, it's very likely they were under pressure to make it work quickly so they took shortcuts. What makes you think the programmers of the intelligence agencies have godlike powers over their (very likely) military superiors? Answer is, they don't. Programmers have no executive powers and their counsel is usually met with skepticism if it doesn't fit the management's agenda.
When talking about intelligence, our best bet is to do educated guesses. If we had hard facts we would be targets. As mentioned in another reply of mine directed at you -- it's their job to hide the facts. So you requesting proof of these matters is basically refuting all possibility of intelligence agency commission of the Intel ME on the grounds of "hey, you are not the next Edward Snowden so your arguments are invalid".
Meh. You come across as a guy who basically says "my speculation is better than yours". Not constructive.