It's absurd to suggest that the NSA is the guiding hand behind the IME. For one thing, the enterprise use cases for the thing are quite obvious, so it's not lik

It's absurd to suggest that the NSA is the guiding hand behind the IME. For one thing, the enterprise use cases for the thing are quite obvious, so it's not like the NSA would have had to compel Intel to design and implement it in the first place. And if there weren't a demand for it, there's no way the US government could COMPEL them to make the business decision to undertake a massive change to their core product. Nor could they realistically bribe them to do it, not because the government lacks access to funds to make a sufficient large hypothetical bribe, but because Intel is a huge publicly traded multinational. How many employees do you think worked on the IME? How much money do you think it cost? Maybe the NSA has access to some unaccountable billions to throw; would Intel be able to explain that windfall in its books? Perhaps. But how many people would have to keep quiet in perpetuity about all of this? It just keeps stretching believability the more you think about it, like all conspiracy theories that involve more than a handful of actors.