Completely agree. Anybody recall the TPM? Security is pretty much turtles all the way down.
Encryption isn't going to help stop a guy with a stick from beating the information out of you. A functional state, however, can help prevent such things from happening.
Not to mention backdoors in routers/cable modems and god knows what else. Every carrier is preloading in spyware to SIM cards now too, wait for that big revelation soon. They can already track you with their program that responds to type 0 sms and now they can OTA update your SIM to run voice capture, sms capture, store accelerometer data for decryption use, turn on the mic and listen in or turn on the camera.
Exactly. There was revelation in a recent court case that the feds had the ability to turn on and listen in on conversations from your cell phone that you thought was off.
this is absolutely spot on, especially the firmware. nobody talks about it and the attack surface is huge.
just to be explicit, hardware backdoors exist as well :)