Canadian Politics Today

I'm finding it hard to understand how this would work.  The operating system wouldn't see those processors though ?  I don't get it.

They hook in below the OS and potentially access devices directly but it is hard to see how they could do anything useful without exploits built into the firmware of the motherboard. This may be something like the heartbleed attack where 99.9999999% of the potentially collected data is useless just but once in a while they find something potentially useful.