> What about your laptop hardware? Definitely it isn't open source.
On some older Thinkpads you can install Coreboot/Libreboot. Or even buy them with that, if flashing the firmware seems to complicated/risky, or necessitating buying equipment one does not have at the ready. Same goes at least for some routers, with OpenWRT, or the likes, or depending on the used connection technology going 'full personal computer' with some Linux/BSD again, with even more options regarding Core-/Librebroot/Dasharo underneath. There are always some paths for at least some aspects of that stuff. Most funny thing, if you don't trust your switches is something like https://www.apalrd.net/posts/2025/network_smartsfp/ <-that's not the only one. Imagine a cluster of firewalls in your ports!1!!
The question is if it's worth it? Or maybe more like a hobby with the benefit of staying technologically fit, but at the end of the day more like LARPing 'prepping'?
I suspect the people who have jobs that have made them capable of building and flashing their own firmware are exactly the sorts of people the NSA would be more likely to target and thus these tactics become all the more important.
Things like Intel ME are a straight up backdoor in consumer CPUs though, which is a bigger problem that is hard to disable. Government workers buy special laptops from Dell etc that disable this for security reasons, but difficult to get consumer laptop CPUs as a civilian that do not have ME or a similar technology enabled.
Thankfully ME Cleaner is a thing for many consumer CPUs to defang it, though you want this done at the firmware level, and that is where coreboot becomes all but a hard requirement.
I am convinced it is critical for preservation of our basic freedoms that digital sovereignty becomes the norm.