Sounds like the sort of resources that most governments could command but few criminals? But of course with criminals there's always just trying to bribe Intel employees.
Yes - but if you could extract (for example) some HDMI-like master keys (so you can pirate first run movies for resale), or eventual access to someone's billion dollar bitcoin stash, it might be worth the trouble. It's not something you'd do to get cheap netflix/etc
It is something a government might do to get someone's crypto keys or iPhone, or to hack into foreign network infrastructure (Huawei/etc) (after all in the past they've built special purpose submarines to do such things)
I think the parent comment was more likely referring to using these devices for personal privacy. For example can a criminal steal my personal information in my phone vs. can the government spy on me. Where the government might spend a million dollars to do this process to read the phone of a terrorist, but a criminal probably wouldn't to steal my personal information off of a phone or USB drive.
Those people are fine. I'm looking at this from the perspective of the malware that can survive across OS re-installs because Intel put this enclave in your CPU that you can't touch. I'd assume the NSA is using that to spy on people right now but the question is how many other groups.
Not the parent commenter, but I suspect it’s less the act than the motivation.
Criminals who anticipate finding a way to profit on the information would be far more likely to go through the trouble of bribing someone or investing in the resources to snag it.
