>>1The cost of freedom has always been expensive. One reason why commodity computing is "low-priced" is to attract more people who judge their purchase on the price tag. I value my freedom more than a little money so I'm willing to pay more to get it.
>>5It's trivial to detect if there's a suspicious Internet connection happening from your computer. All you need to do is to put a trusted data logger in between your computer and the Internet and keep a watch on the traffic. People say that Intel (and AMD for that matter) have backdoors but I haven't seen any news of these backdoors being exploited by some bad actor. Given the wide customer base of Intel (and AMD), I would have hoped that somebody would have recorded hard proof this happening.