[kazinator]

You and I can encrypt our data before saving it into the cloud, because we have nothing of value or interest to someone with the resources of a state.

Sometimes sensitive data at the government level has a pretty long shelf life; you may want it to remain secret in 30, 50, 70 years.

[waterTanuki]

I don't see how this is any different than countries putting significant portions of their gold & currency reserves in the NY Federal Reserve Bank. If for some reason the U.S. just decided to declare "Your monies are all mine now" the effects would be equally if not more devastating than a data breach.

[tsimionescu]

The difference is that there are sometimes options to recover the money, and at least other countries will see and know that this happened, and may take some action.

A data breach, however, is completely secret - both from you and from others. Another country (not even necessarily the one that is physically hosting your data) may have access to your data, and neither you nor anyone else would necessarily know.

[don_esteban]

Exactly that happened to Russia, Iran, Venezuela

[kazinator]

Not North Korea though; they just have hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid parking tickets invested in the USA, which is a negative.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/north-korea-parking-ti... [2017]