Look for the Trusted Computing Platform and the Consortium.
There is a sibling here talking about it being a conspiracy theory, but it was an official organization, with many published technical documents, that had the explicit goal of removing the user's rights to manage their own computers.
> Members include Intel, AMD, IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco.
> The core idea of trusted computing is to give hardware manufacturers control over what software does and does not run on a system by refusing to run unsigned software
I see that you are quoting Wikipedia, which claims to be quoting Trusted Platform Module FAQ from 2006[0]. However, if you actually read the FAQ, the authors explicitly reject that:
> Can the Trusted Platform Module control what software runs?
> No. There is no ability to do this. The subsystem can only act as a 'slave' to higher level services and applications by storing and reporting pre-runtime configuration information. Other applications determine what is done with this information. At no time can the TCG building blocks 'control' the system or report the status of applications that are running.
I'm not saying TPMs cannot be (or are not, today) used to give non-users control over what users can do with software running on their machine, however in the absence of evidence, I'm not inclined to believe that trusted computing efforts started with such "evil" intentions in the first place.
Albeit heavily abused, TPMs are still a great idea IMO.
Good catch, thank you for the correction. I should have dug deeper, at least to skim through the source material, instead of trusting a Wikipedia article to confirm my bias.
There are lots of totally well meaning reasons to put unique ID'S in hardware: asset management and theft mitigation, security by locking SW to particular HW, etc. Not saying those are good ideas, just that a well meaning person could come up with them on service of reasonable customer benefits.
maybe because the NSA had enough compromising stuff (aka kompromat) on some high-enough Intel bigwig(s) to convince them to implement it. As in: "a nice career and family life you got there. Would be a pity if that all went down the drain just because of some stupid scandal, wouldn't it? Besides, by pushing this simple little feature for us, you'll be proving to be a real patriot. You wouldn't want to be a non-patriot now, would you?"
Is there any evidence to suggest kompromat has ever been used to blackmail American tech executives to backdoor their products for NSA or other agency?
If there were any solid evidence, then the program would be unable to continue, because -in large part- the folks being blackmailed would have solid reason to distrust that the blackmailer would actually keep their secrets.
There is circumstantial evidence that the NSA is shady as shit. A few notable items:
1) The NSA coerced nearly every major and minor telco in the US to assist in their ongoing highly-illegal domestic wiretapping operations. (When this came to light, Congress retroactively immunized (from prosecution) those telcos that assisted the NSA in breaking the law.)
2) The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper knowingly lied by omission before Congress about the scope and nature of NSA's domestic wiretapping operations.
3) The NSA's lawyers lied under oath to the US Supreme Court about the NSA's various domestic wiretapping operations.
In a similar way, there's no solid evidence that TSA was a combination jobs program, massive money-making program for then-VP Dick Cheney's business buddies and their pretty-useless microwave-imaging device company, and internal contraband-and-warrant checkpoint-establishment program. But when you compare the organization's stated goals with what it actually achieves, and how it responds to criticism at the difference between the two, it's pretty clear that its stated aims are substantially different from its actual aims.
