Total newbie here. How can I be sure that my hardware hasn’t had some type of backdoor installed? Either by Purism or the NSA en route to me during shipping? How can I know that I can trust the Librem 14 hardware to not be spying on me? Is there a resource that I can use to compare my hardware with known good hardware? How do we know that the government isn’t paying purism to install malicious hardware to specific targets? Thanks for helping to enlighten a complete newb!
You want the Anti-Interdiction service.
You can also use the warrant canary to cover part of the remaining scenario.
I’m not sure that that is possible. If you can’t trust the hardware supplier then you will have to build the entirety of the computer yourself, components and all.
You can build the software from source, after inspecting the entirety of the source code for backdoors. Obviously easier said than done.
The Librem 14 also has some protection against the malicious compromise of some of the hardware components e.g. WiFi and SSD (and microphone / camera).