I'm glad you raise the question freeduck. I was actually going to post something like it once the more important discussion about opposing surveillance by social and political means has got going properly (technical solutions won't fix the deeper problem of authoritarian tendencies in society). A few years ago I read about remote control by hardware in this article: http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-opinion/39455-big-brother-po...

Be sure to check the video linked at the end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlj7u3tOQ9s

I don't know much about this myself but I'll be very interested to see the HN community's take on to what extent we can trust out hardware.