In a decision asserting broad authority for the CFPB and which is certain to set the tone for future CFPB appellate rulings, Bureau director Richard Cordray recently issued the Bureau’s first decision from an appeal of a Bureau administrative enforcement action. The decision, issued June 4, generally affirmed a 2014 Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) decision…

Technology Disputes

This week, the social networking service Facebook quietly announced that it will begin making PGP encryption available for communications from Facebook to its users.  While this step, in itself, is a small one not likely to directly impact many individuals, if it signals a resurgence in development of public key cryptography for use by the general public, it will have dramatic consequences for the privacy and security community and for the lawyers who support it.

PGP is the encryption protocol developed in the 1990s by Phil Zimmermann as the first tool widely available for general public use that applies the same highly secure encryption techniques once used almost exclusively by governments and military to secure communications. At the time, encryption technology was restricted from export, and the author fought a long legal battle over his release of the product. While sophisticated in its encryption capabilities, PGP and more recent incarnations of similar techniques have suffered greatly from a lack of high-quality software implementations to make them user friendly and to automate the steps (such as “key signature”) to make them secure.

In a recent letter, 58 members of Congress asked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to exercise its rule-making authority and ban mandatory arbitration provisions in consumer financial agreements. In support of their request, the authors cite the CFPB’s March 2015 internal study on arbitration, which the CFPB conducted pursuant to Section 1028 of…

Does the False Claims Act’s antiretaliation provision, 31 U.S.C. § 3730(h)(1), apply to an “employer that fire[s] an employee after discovering that the employee was a whistleblower and relator in an ongoing qui tam action under the FCA against his former, unrelated employer”?  Cestra v. Mylan, Inc, No. 14-825, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 67069…

The TILA/RESPA integrated disclosures (TRID) rule issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act takes effect on August 1, 2015. Once effective, the TRID will drastically alter, among other things, the pre-closing disclosures that creditors, mortgage brokers and settlement agents must provide to borrowers under…