Routine inclusion of remote diagnostics in the chipsets and board designs means that you can have designed-in capability not enabled, you can have pinouts but n

Routine inclusion of remote diagnostics in the chipsets and board designs means that you can have designed-in capability not enabled, you can have pinouts but no chips, you can have the full stack and not have consciously paid for it. It doesn't take a conspiracy to say there's a risk. I would argue outsourcing to least cost providers put a supply chain risk on the table which transcends killswitch questions: Some amount of tech infra in EU should be made from locally sourced products and diversity of sources is a cost which includes complexity and potential weaknesses, but probably offsets other problems. Its not a one-size-fits-all problem. People would be amazed how powerful things like USB keyboard chipsets are. SD cards can be reprogrammed to run a tiny Linux. All kinds of sub-components of a computer system are themselves made up of an ARM or MIPS core, some persisting memory and access to a bus. They don't function as an independent computer in the context of being a PCI bus controller for the main CPU (as a fictional example), but they are. If you have some complex machine and can plug a device into a USB port, the chances are the device has chips which are capable of doing a shitload more than you realise, but are runtime constrained down not to do it.