I'm not contradicting myself. The US Government isn't a normal consumer, and they have enough manpower to manually flash their machines (they might even get cus

I'm not contradicting myself. The US Government isn't a normal consumer, and they have enough manpower to manually flash their machines (they might even get custom firmware from vendors). Intel hiding CPU features is nothing new. Especially a feature that requires you to attach a flash programmer to your motherboard in order to use it, because you need to modify the descriptor table. If you're asking why they didn't make it easier to "disable" Intel ME (it's still used for hardware initialisation), then we go back to economics. And they'd have to co-ordinate with people that write mainboard firmware in order to make sure this feature is available for all machines that have Intel CPUs. [Just to be clear, I'm also critical of Intel. I just don't understand the view that Intel's decisions are anything other than profit-driven. That's how all companies work.]