A step in the right direction but until there are more robust privacy laws in place, this will not go away.
If their gov is restricted on buying from data brokers, are other governments, foreign entities?
The inherit issue is the American's data can be harvested and sold. Setting up legal restrictions toward certain entities will just cause those entities to "legally self identify" as another entity. Or do business with an entity that is allowed access to American's data.
Youre right, The 2 port vaults are $176 which is almost double your budget. I figured you could find a used one for cheaper, but I just looked around and you cannot :(
You can check out ODROID. The ARM version for $83 and a x86 version for $129. You can play around with specs and models and get those numbers down lower. Pretty large community playing with them, BSD probably can support them or at least the info is most likely in a forum somewhere.