I watched Cory Doctorow's talk "The Coming War on General Computation," and I recommend it if you want any specific details, arguing points, and even a good reminder of very bad recent policies when it comes to protecting ourselves from corporate (and government) invasion into our privacy and security.
Video Transcript
The low-level software he mentions for possible abuse by Big Brother is UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface).
Here are the organizations he mentions near the end (at 29:15) (except the "org" which I cannot find):
- EFF eff.org
- Bits of Freedom bof.nl
- EDRI edri.org
- CCC ccc.de
- Netzpolitik netzpolitik.org
- La Quadrature du Net www.laquadrature.net
BTW, I highly recommend his book "Little Brother".