The fly in this somewhat "paranoid" ointment is that if it were believeably rumoured to be true it would set off a stampede to alternate platforms (Alpha, Power PC, etc.), potentially destroying Intel. I would not trust such a platform, but many of the sheeple might until a few high-profile cases surfaced.
I find the notion of an extremely wide deployment (as any Intel x86 product will be) of machines with processors that support encrypted instruction sets and associated smart cards deeply disquieting.
It seems to me that this is enabling technology that would allow the insertion of autonomous encrypted 'little brothers', into operating systems and perhaps major net applications such as web browsers as well.. These 'little brother' observers could be made completely opaque to even determined and sophisticated users - with encrypted code and the potential for encryption of all their data it would require breaking the encryption for an independant entity to understand what such an agent was doing and who it was doing it for. And by making support of such agents part of the encrypted inner ring of an OS (Win99?), it might be very nearly impossible to run the OS without the agent or agents present and operating properly. And as more and more PCs are net connected, such agents would not need to operate entirely autonomously, as they could communicate over encrypted links with their Big Brother somewhere else.
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