Even if the LED were controlled by hardware, merely that you can reprogram the camera firmware on this Thinkpad is troubling. Malicious things can be done without the ability to turn off the LED during recording. Like capture images during legitimate recording, or start recording with the LED on banking on the user not noticing.

Firmware programming should require physical access, like temporarily installing a jumper, or pushing some button on the circuit board or something.

(I don't want to suggest signed images, because that's yet another face of the devil).