I'd like to imagine that the engineers tasked with developing these systems are aware of management's evil endgame, and leave in whatever obvious bugs they can to slow down the loss of computational freedom. The spec for the next version will include an on chip regulator, and they'll have to sabotage it a different way.
Uh, this is completely unethical behavior from an engineer. In no way, shape, or form is the insertion of a deliberate, hidden flaw that breaks the intended security properties of a system an acceptable form of protest.
It wouldn't be a "protest". Rather, it would be directly preserving individual human autonomy against emergent entities. Would you also consider it "unethical" for a farm animal to break out of its pen?
The true ethics violation here is creating devices to be "sold" while retaining control over their new supposed owner. Unfortunately, the digital/software engineer's main recourse to ethical violations is to quit, and someone else will just take their place. As the digital honeymoon wears off and we become keenly aware of communications technology's authoritarian potential, I hope there is a different type of resistance forming within all of these systems of control.
