[nnfy]

Perhaps you're not familiar with Intel's management engine?

[LeoPanthera]

If you are suggesting that the IME is being used by the NSA to spy on Americans, there is no [citation needed] big enough for your comment.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Not necessarily, but unless every part of the stack is open, how can you truly be certain? For desktops it's not as big of a deal, since you can monitor the network activity through a router. But for a smartphones it seems like it'd be much harder to detect.

EDIT: Active spying might be pushing it too far, but backdoors? It wouldn't surprise me to learn my hardware has a few backdoors.

[bdamm]

"How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork." -Orwell, 1984.

[Cyph0n]

I might have agreed with you pre-Snowden, but now we know that there seem to be no such limits.

[Karunamon]

There's no concrete evidence of such a thing, but keep in mind that the ME is advanced enough and exerts enough control over the installed system that it can be hacked and a keylogger covertly installed.

Knowing what I know of enterprise coding standards, the likelihood is greater that it is being abused than it isn't.