Is it possible that Intel is aided and controlled by the CIA, like Google and Facebook (Part 1)
I don't have proof of this yet, but bear with me. If this is something you'd be interested in helping me investigate, by all means do!
Here's what I know:
1) In the 90s Intel's chips were nowhere near the best or fastest and there were a ton of competitors who, frankly, were eating their lunch. Intel CPUs were simplistic toys compared to the CPUs being created by SGI, Sun, IBM, HP, and DEC which all ran their own flavors of UNIX. An intel-based system is what you purchased if you couldn't afford anything better. For any of you in the field back then, RISC architectures had some huge advantages and the x86 ISA was just awful to write assembly in compared to its competitors.
2) Fast-forward to 2010: HP's PA-RISC hardware is no longer sold. SGI is out of business. DEC sold their ALPHA designs to Compaq who then buried them by the time they were purchased by HP. At this point the majority of people and business are using Windows PCs. IBM and Sun are still producing their own hardware and OS but their marketshare has shrunk to a tiny fraction of what it was.
3) Fast-forward to today: Sun was purchased by Oracle. Sun's SPARC architecture was buried a few years ago. IBM is the sole non-PC manufacturer left, but almost all of their non-Intel sales are supercomputers to national laboraties and governments and mainframes to banks. PC/Intel machines running Windows and Linux have taken over. 5 once-major operating systems from those manufacturers are either dead or effectively dead.
Microsoft and software/OS
It seems to me that if the CIA wanted to be able to snoop on and control a huge swath of the population, then this would be a reasonable way to do it:
1) Find a couple of small upstart companies (Microsoft and Intel) who are competing with the old behemoths and, in exchange for cooperation, fund and propel them to the point that they are the platform that most people use. Other companies I can think of that rose quickly and prominantly like Microsoft are Facebook and Google (both CIA-backed), and Amazon (still on my list to research). Hmmmm.
2) When a disruptive technology comes along that threatens Windows (and your backdoors) on servers (i.e.: Linux) you take a two-pronged approach: you use identity politics and SJW bullshit to try to take the reins of the development of Linux (Linus was finally forced out last year because of his "noninclusive" approach), but more importantly, you move your focus to owning the system underneath the OS.
Intel and hardware/firmware
How do you own the system? That's where Intel comes in. I need to do more research, but from what I'm seeing, there have been major exploitable vulnerabilities in Intel's systems at pretty much any given point in time since the 1990s.
https://www.wired.com/story/meltdown-spectre-bug-collision-intel-chip-flaw-discovery/
https://meltdownattack.com/ (details and papers here)
(remember, Meltdown and Spectre were issues for 20 YEARS before they were disovered)
There are tons more examples, but let's continue. How can they have more visibility into your computers and data?