Forget about AMT, it's a major pain to enable even if you need to. The Computrace "Laptop LoJack" application is trivial to activate has been embedded in most major OEM bios for years.
It's capable of phoning home, deleting or replacing files on the operating system and wiping out the system. It can persist across re installations of support operating systems. When combined with AMT features it can permanently brick the device as well.
Reading this sentence from the article reminded me of Computrace:
because even a rudimentary NTFS driver would require at least several tens of kilobytes of space when compressed
The Computrace option ROM is a little over 20KB (compressed), yet it contains much of the functionality of the NSA backdoor described in the article - including write-support drivers for FAT/FAT32/NTFS.
So the reason for using the RAID controller's option ROM may be for stealth instead of size restrictions, and it also means that, if the NSA can tell Absolute what to do, they already have a BIOS-level backdoor into nearly everyone's machines.
Offtopic, but I've been trying to get into my Thinkpad X1's AMT setup - I hit ctrl-P on boot but it is missing some kind of file and just boots normally. Anyone know anything about it?
