IIRC, there was a non-publicly-known switch to turn off IME, for government purposes, which became publicly-known. There have also been efforts to delete just part of IME from the flash. A couple links:
On X200-era systems, however, you can remove IME entirely from the flash, which is what I did. I put only Coreboot and GRUB2 on the flash, but you can add SeaBIOS to that, if you want more PC BIOS facilities and options available.
(So I stockpiled a few backup units of the X200, before they disappeared from the market, or the available units got too beaten up or expensive.)
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner https://doc.coreboot.org/northbridge/intel/sandybridge/me_cl...
On X200-era systems, however, you can remove IME entirely from the flash, which is what I did. I put only Coreboot and GRUB2 on the flash, but you can add SeaBIOS to that, if you want more PC BIOS facilities and options available.
(So I stockpiled a few backup units of the X200, before they disappeared from the market, or the available units got too beaten up or expensive.)