It’s a tricky situation to navigate.

There is the technical aspect, namely is it actually feasible, but itself wrapped within an economical and political context, as I’ve highlighted in another thread on this post.

On one hand we learn from Snowden’s leaks about an entire surveillance apparatus, we might also have a conceptual understand of limitations via articles like “On trusting trust”, plain incompetence and shortcuts for large companies, so all that and more invite us to be very prudent. Those are actual justifications for questioning what hardware, if any, can be trusted.

Yet… one can’t go from those justifications to speculate. Yes there might be flaws, intentional or not, in both the design or the production or both of chips. Still, it’s not because it’s conceptually possible, or even that it happened before, that it does happen today and at scale.

Your System76 is an interesting example and it’s a bit like my Banana Pi tinkering, or even more limited (yet exciting IMHO) the Precursor. Namely it’s a very costly trade off today to “work” with hardware one can (at least try to) understand better, hopefully itself leading to better privacy and security. In the end most of us believe the trade off for more affordable performances trumps that deeper understanding.