New ask Hacker News story: Are opaque basebands a national security risk?

Are opaque basebands a national security risk?
15 by javajosh | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I have this vague unease about computing, that there's far too much mutable state between 'power on' and 'seeing my application window'. This is particularly true with smartphones, where in addition to the mysteries of where and how BIOS, UART, boot loaders, TPM, CPU microcode state was obtained (and how it can be updated), you also have the extra-mysterious baseband. Which, as I understand it, is your carrier's trump card on your device - a whole computer-within-a-computer, controllable directly from the radio, can access all devices, all storage and even read/write the working memory of your operating system. (It may seem like a neat superpower to have, but it's a superpower built on artificially weakening the population. Putting spyware on people's second-brains feels wrong. But it also seems like a critical vulnerability in the event of war. Consider the prize of gaining access to a privileged baseband distribution channel! Wouldn't it be better, from a national security perspective, to disallow the practice of proprietary, privileged channels entirely? Or do the benefits of having that channel outweigh the risks?