Banks Fined $549 Million Over Use of WhatsApp and Other Messaging Apps (nytimes.com) 28
Federal regulators continued their crackdown against employees of Wall Street firms using private messaging apps to communicate, with 11 brokerage firms and investment advisers agreeing Tuesday to pay $549 million in fines. From a report: Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Societe Generale and Bank of Montreal were hit with the biggest penalties by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Together, the brokerage and investment advisory arms of those four financial institutions accounted for nearly 90 percent of the fines, according to statements released by the regulators.
The latest round of fines adds to the nearly $2 billion in penalties against big Wall Street banks announced last year for similar violations. In all, the regulators have now penalized more than two dozen banks and investment firms for not properly policing employees use of "off channel" messaging services like WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal. The S.E.C. charged the financial institutions for failing to properly "maintain and preserve" all official communications by their employees. Federal securities laws require banks and investments firms to maintain records and make sure their employees are not conducting company business using unauthorized means of communication.
The latest round of fines adds to the nearly $2 billion in penalties against big Wall Street banks announced last year for similar violations. In all, the regulators have now penalized more than two dozen banks and investment firms for not properly policing employees use of "off channel" messaging services like WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal. The S.E.C. charged the financial institutions for failing to properly "maintain and preserve" all official communications by their employees. Federal securities laws require banks and investments firms to maintain records and make sure their employees are not conducting company business using unauthorized means of communication.
Re:WhatsApp has E2E encryption (Score:5, Informative)
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The SEC 'charged the financial institutions for failing to properly "maintain and preserve" all official communications by their employees'. They aren't being charged for using apps with weak encryption to mask their activity.
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The anwer to your question is, Hillary did not need an excuse because at the time she was Secretary of State, it was not against the rules for the Secretary of State to use their own e-mail server. That rule was put in place years after Hillary left office. For example, Colin Powell, Secretary of State for George W. Bush, also used a own private server.
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Ironically, Hillary's email server turned out to be more secure than the State Dept's own servers, which got hacked. However, just like the current situation with the banks, it was illegal for her to do that, but under a different statute, though her motivations were the same: keep things secret that are not supposed to be.
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And is probably better engineered than whatever else the bank might use from a security perspective. When dolling out fines, the actual risks should be taken into account. WhatsApp is pretty risk free from a banks perspective.
IMHO, at first glance, it's just an attempt to control the narrative and sniff everything.
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That's part of WHY they are bad: it's secret communication that cannot be found by regulators.
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Banks fined $549M. But made $54.9B during the scheme.
Fines need to be revenue x10. Not revenue / 10. I'm specifically not saying "profits" and paid from c-suite salaries & compensation, board compensation, then corporate profits.
But the CEO had nothing to do with this! BS! If leadership starts at the top, so do penalties.
not strong at math are you? should have been revenue /100 as far as I can tell
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Fines need to be revenue x10. Not revenue / 10.
It seems a little extreme to destroy a company for chatting with unapproved tools.
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and especially weird here on slashdot where where you know, at some point people were supporting using enabling technology like linux, smartphones, work from home etc rather than the corporate IT department mandated Windows PC locked down to not install any software and with a corporate firewall that blocked most useful things, etc. etc.
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That's easy. It's a free speech issue to anyone who blames the government for all of their problems because personal responsibility is something that happens to other people, not to them. Nowadays in the USA this is primarily (but not exclusively) folks on the rightward end of politics; it has been different in the past.
It's also a good sign of someone who will loudly explain the constitution to you, incorrectly but with great fervor.. They will explain how THEIR book-banning by the state government is l
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Free speech infringement by creating a burden or impediment against speech. That's also content-based, in that they arbitrarily decide text-based communication has to be captured by an electronics records system. But an
employee can meet people in person, or call them on the phone, and there's no record of communications --- the only records in that case would be the actual transaction records of business conducted.
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Free speech infringement by creating a burden or impediment against speech.
And we do it all the time. I'm not allowed to stand outside in my driveway at 11pm with a megaphone because as a society we determined that would be infringing on my neighbor's right to enjoy peace and quiet. Wall Street banks aren't allowed to formally communicate with Brokerage firms over untraceable messaging platforms because we as a society determined that they are going to bend us over again, and maybe if they think we are watching they might have a second thought about it. (idk, the analogy sounded
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Stop licking investment banker boots.
Re:Dilemma (Score:4, Informative)
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Need to exchange private/personal information? Every bank on the planet has a secure e-mail function.
BiL aka Banque Internationale à Luxembourg obviously has not. [https://www.bil.com] They stopped answering my emails with responses like "use the web interface, we are switching to a more secure replacement for emails".
(Needless to say: they did not answer my inquiries via the web interface either)
Took me a lawyer to make them answer. $1500 costs in total.
Worst bank ever.
Bottom line it seems that it esc
Cost of doing business (Score:4, Insightful)
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I bet the individual fines for each bank work out to be a lot less than they made in illicit deals to increase profits illegally. It's just another cost of doing business to them. Why not hit them where it hurts, i.e. put restrictions on the future business & trading?
Simple answer? Because banks lobbied to pay fines instead. Why? Because they're fucking worth it. Every time.
Corrupt answer? See above.
Accurate answer? See above.
Should be shut down, or 50% of revenue lost. (Score:2)
This kind of stuff is done because it's profitable.