Is the Intel ME (NSA b/door?) fully disabled on all devices?

[FranklyFlawless]

I see, it was one of the many inline references from a blog article I linked recently on the Purism community forums:

Firmware Security Realizations – Part 2 – Start Your Management Engine

In 2018, vulnerabilities related to Intel ME manufacturing mode were discovered by security researchers and presented at the Hack-In-The-Box conference. This research details a method of altering the ME SPI flash region while the system is running, when manufacturing mode has been left open on a system, in order to be able to exploit SA-00086. This is significant because it allows an attacker to run code in Intel ME without requiring physical access to the system (if you are curious at this point about how to detect if your system is in manufacturing mode don’t worry as I will show you a few different methods to detect this condition in the article).

See also:

Hardware backdoors, what we know and what we don't know: a discussion thread

Here are a few resources I have been reading recently: