Let's agree to ignore vendors going to the additional effort of putting in intentional back doors in their chips for the moment. That's not the issue I'm discus

Let's agree to ignore vendors going to the additional effort of putting in intentional back doors in their chips for the moment. That's not the issue I'm discussing in any of my comments. > I do and what you are claiming is: That is not what I'm claiming at all. The datasheet is the hardware equivalent of an API interface. I have not stated otherwise. > Knowing the datasheet = Knowing exactly how the chips are being used. By having the datasheet and the kernel source code you can see how the chips are being used by the operating system. Without the datasheet, you have to reverse engineer what the OS/kernel is doing to the chip. If you also happen to lack the OS/kernel source code, then you have to resort to black box reverse engineering. > Knowing the datasheet just gives you the functionality definition and capabilities of a particular chipset. This. Is. Exactly. My. Point. Apple is still, to my knowledge, not publishing any datasheets for the T2. Therefore you CANNOT KNOW the "functionality definition and capabilities of" the T2 inside the iMac Pro except by the methods I describe above (either source code inspection or black box reverse engineering). None of my comments have been about the internal operations of these chips or what nefarious nation states or three letter agencies may or may not be doing. It was entirely about Apple replacing components with datasheets with a component lacking a datasheet. jfc