Of course this shifts the trust to the computing system,
the CPU, and so on. I guess there are also "traps" in the
CPU and, in fact, in every sufficiently advanced mass-
marketed chip. Wealthy nations can find those. Therefore
these are mainly used for criminal investigation and
"control of public dissent".
I'm unsure in which way a government agency could benefit from having backdoors in the CPU? Even if they did, and even if it could detect that some sort of encryption was going on, where would it store the interesting data?
Well, there was/is that trusted computing thing, i.e. putting DRM on the PC in hardware. The benefit would be denying encryption from terrorists/pirates/dissenters, like he just said. Interesting data can be stored just about anywhere, from phoning home to hidden partitions to having a small flash on the BIOS, depending on what's deemed interesting (logs, sector addresses, cryptographic keys, painted files).
