Opening firmware would be simple. Many devices have loadable firmware, like your phone's baseband processor. The toolchain is unlikely to be exotic, and providing build-able source code should not be a great burden. Some people hack baseband firmware for fun. They manage to reverse engineer it and inject new code with publicly available tools.

Considering the grave threat to US online services' from lack of trust, you would think that some announcement in this direction might have been made. Crickets, so far.