There was a CCC talk about it recently https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustworthy_x86_laptops https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reas

There was a CCC talk about it recently https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustworthy_x86_laptops https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustwor... and there is a good write up about it on Libreboot site https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme. With regards to why people aren't talking more about this, maybe fatalism is involved as it seems there is a certain inevitability that whoever controls the silicon also controls to some extent computers. There have been some interesting developments in people trying to create open hardware like lowRISC http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/ and also using ARM so there is some hope in this area.