It's a different agency, but Matt Levine has written a fair amount on the SEC making a killing by fining banks when their employees use SMS or WhatsApp. It's a

It's a different agency, but Matt Levine has written a fair amount on the SEC making a killing by fining banks when their employees use SMS or WhatsApp. It's a similar story where conversations that might have been held at the water cooler, lunch, after-work beers or the golf course are now often done through text which according to SEC means different regulation applies. > From the perspective of the banks, I have argued, this is a novel expansion of the SEC’s authority. When the SEC created its rules on recordkeeping, it required banks to retain copies of their “inter-office memoranda,” but it was 1948 and those memoranda were produced with carbon paper; they were formal business records memorializing serious policies. In the 2020s, WhatsApp chats are, in large part, substitutes not for formal memoranda but for talking to someone in person. When I was a banker, I have written, “There were some mornings when I sent more than 100 inter-office memoranda, though like 20 of them would be ‘lol’ or ‘fml.’” In 1948, the SEC would not have dreamed of demanding a searchable archive of all of the informal chats held at a brokerage: That was not technologically feasible, and also did not seem to be the point of its rules. In 2022, it was feasible, and the SEC did demand it, and when the brokers were missing some chats they paid a billion dollars in fines.