Sorry, not an answer to your question, but I did think about this while reading the article, and these new findings do seem to make Richard Stallman's 'entirely free and open laptop' efforts seem not so crazy, after all.

No one thinks the rationale for the free and open laptop is crazy. Just the cost and capability.

That said, right now there is not a single hardware manufacturer in the world who is not open to government pressure.

Perhaps the only answer to all this is to make our institutions irrevocably open - that there are open publicised hardware standards and means of verifying the circuits are the design expected.

No. A modern device (PC, tablet, phone) is full of firmware/binary blobs: graphic accelerator, WiFi/Bluetooth module etc. There's a small Open Source Hardware movement (http://www.oshwa.org/definition/), but it's nowhere near it's software counterpart. I hope such revelations will help to get it moving.