alt Hacker NewsI agree with the first part. I think this article by FSF about Intel's ME summarizes the issue https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/blogs/Intel_ME_Carikli_article_...
As for the second part, I am not sure about how living in a five eyes state would mitigate it. What do you mean by that?
As five eyes citizen you have at least some rights on paper and you can appeal to your government, but if you are foreigner these guys can go gloves off without any fear of retribution.
Try analyzing Epstein files and posting about it, they'll give you a proper penetration test of all your devices to see what you found out about their ex employee.
Nowadays even EU citizens migrating away from US cloud providers are a "national security issue".