No built-in cameras or mics would be an excellent feature, even for phones. I would have already pre-orded the Librem 5, for the same price, if Purism had offered that.
Cameras and mics are useful for videoconferencing calls. Attaching a mic and cam via USB can be done, but that's extra crap you have to haul around in your luggage; it's much more space-efficient to have it built into your laptop.
The answer is really simple, and I'm disappointed that I seem to be the only one who can think of this: why not just have a mechanical toggle switch that turns off these devices? (No, don't let it be a software switch, it needs to actually disconnect the devices from the computer; it can do this with transistor switches but the devices still need to be off the computer's internal USB bus, and there must be no way for software on the computer to reactivate them secretly.)
The answer is really simple, and I'm disappointed that I seem to be the only one who can think of this: why not just have a mechanical toggle switch that turns off these devices? (No, don't let it be a software switch, it needs to actually disconnect the devices from the computer; it can do this with transistor switches but the devices still need to be off the computer's internal USB bus, and there must be no way for software on the computer to reactivate them secretly.)