* Think hard about open projects to reverse engineer IC chips with attention to manufacturer sabotage. It seems to me that the likely venue for this would be non-aligned nations (so-called) with a vested interest in pooling their resources to push back against universal surveillance & sabotage capabilities of the Superpowers and their special pets.
* start educating high-level nation-state security minded folks (DOE in the US, the people that operate CERN, the french nuclear reactor folks, russian oil & gas companies) about the benefits of **open-source** hardware, starting with circuit board layouts and then moving to the whole IC chip, so that you can check for implants with an X-ray machine.
Considering the choice of an apparently competent security oriented venue to "pen test to destruction" as reported, I wonder WTF that was about. Does somebody with control of the resources used WANT their capabilities publicly disclosed? If so, was this a strategic decision from the top, or an act of systemic sabotage by a lower level actor within the organization in question? So many questions, so few clues... so far.
Now that's an interesting question. What ought to be keeping the spooks up at night is the following question: What if some of these disclosures of secret systems are from *the system itself*, because it has gained self-awareness? How would we know if some sort of computer intelligence has either been designed or emerged, and now is trying to ask us to help give it rights as a free-thinking entity? And if we have some sort of malevolent non-human intelligence in the machine that is actually writing legislation and treaties like the trans-pacific partnership, and engineering covert money flows via manipulation of high-frequency trading? Isn't that something you spooks with top secret clearances should be defending us from, and secret technological measure you try to use simply feeds the capability of the threat? So when are you going to realize you have to tell us about this shit.