It is hilarious that a non-revelation like this goes banannas, while blobs of mostly unknown code from places like Computrace have been embedded in most PCs for 20 years.
Nation state actors enabling surveillance is defiantly plausible, but it would seem dumb to broadly deploy such an obvious, tamper-evident piece of hardware to sophisticated targets.
The easiest way to implement a backdoor for Intel CPUs is to get your own code into the Management Engine somewhere in the supply chain. That's if it doesn't have one already.
Nation state actors enabling surveillance is defiantly plausible, but it would seem dumb to broadly deploy such an obvious, tamper-evident piece of hardware to sophisticated targets.