Doesn't this seem a little moustache-twirly, even for the NSA? I imagine the only way they'd actually expend the necessary man-hours on this is if they were intercepting hardware ordered by people who were already targets of interest. Now, that probably means Merkel should buy her laptops in-store, with cash, but this really doesn't seem like the sort of panopticon story we've been reading elsewhere. Unless, of course, they've managed to convince a judge to give them a warrant to compromise the Dell/etc factory image.