If it works as well for Big Brother as it does for me, we are safe. (I tried a round of vPro motherboards on my last server buy and got unusable remote screen access functionality with the added treat of an ethernet controller that locks up sporadically under linux.)
Remote administration at a hardware level isn't new. Not hardly. This is trash journalism at its worst. Pulling together a list of technologies and outlining a shallow examination of how they <i>could</i> be abused isn't much use to anyone. If we wanted to play that game, we could fill encyclopedias with lists of ways computers <i>could</i> be used to spy on us.