All that stuff you talked about in the tabletop lore is literally talked about in the game. It’s not hitting you in the face in the main quest line, but if you play the side quests you find tons of fucked up shit that the corps are doing.
the NSA (which lacks a mandate to act on US soil, and CF is a US company)
They absolutely do have a mandate to operate on US soil, that is actually the main mandate and there is a separate military agency (CNMF) that operates on foreign soil. They are both headed by the same guy though so they might as well just be one agency.
depends on how many services you plan on running, i think the i3 would be sufficient for what you listed, the i5 would give you room to grow.
the i7’s usually aren’t worth it for servers since they are just a clock speed increase.
AWS has multiple teirs of storage options in s3, some replicate and some dont. by default those that do replicate do so in multiple availability zones, but not across regions. unless you turn on cross-region replication (CRR) which is an additional charge.
So, for example without CRR if your bucket is in us-east-1 and 1 availability zone goes down you can still access the data, but if all of us-east-1 is down, you cannot.