I suspect the people who have jobs that have made them capable of building and flashing their own firmware are exactly the sorts of people the NSA would be more likely to target and thus these tactics become all the more important.
Things like Intel ME are a straight up backdoor in consumer CPUs though, which is a bigger problem that is hard to disable. Government workers buy special laptops from Dell etc that disable this for security reasons, but difficult to get consumer laptop CPUs as a civilian that do not have ME or a similar technology enabled.
Thankfully ME Cleaner is a thing for many consumer CPUs to defang it, though you want this done at the firmware level, and that is where coreboot becomes all but a hard requirement.
I am convinced it is critical for preservation of our basic freedoms that digital sovereignty becomes the norm.
Things like Intel ME are a straight up backdoor in consumer CPUs though, which is a bigger problem that is hard to disable. Government workers buy special laptops from Dell etc that disable this for security reasons, but difficult to get consumer laptop CPUs as a civilian that do not have ME or a similar technology enabled.
Thankfully ME Cleaner is a thing for many consumer CPUs to defang it, though you want this done at the firmware level, and that is where coreboot becomes all but a hard requirement.
I am convinced it is critical for preservation of our basic freedoms that digital sovereignty becomes the norm.