Law Decoded: How I learned to stop worrying and love the election, Oct. 23-30

The phenomenon of modern information flow has gotten an enormous amount of attention since the last, similarly godawful election cycle, in many ways forcing regular people to think in the uncomfortably paranoiac manner that cybersecurity pros and blockchain programmers, in particular, are well accustomed to.

What is the fear of voter fraud but a double-spend problem? And how can you be sure that every voting machine in America works? And how do I know know that this news report is fact, not fiction or even malicious fabrication?

Today's Law Decoded is less crypto-focused than I traditionally try to keep it, but it's important to keep what the devout call "The space" unsiloed.

Alongside a formal request for more info from consulting giant Bain & Company, the Department of Justice acknowledged that it is investigating Visa's acquisition of omnipresent fintech firm Plaid as an antitrust issue.

Plaid provides interfunctionality between just about every consumer-facing finance app and online banking system you know and love.

The DoJ's investigation may well be based on the fear that Visa, knowing already the data of everyone's spending, is also paying $5 billion to add to that reserve of information about how everyone's money is moving between systems.

More speculative still is the hope that antitrust law will ultimately keep giant firms like Visa from using the data they snag from their clients to snowball ever further down the mountainside.

Last Friday, U.S. Anti-Money Laundering watchdog the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, and the Federal Reserve sent out a joint request for commentary on a proposed major increase in the information that financial institutions, including crypto firms, need to keep on file.

Likely, these regulators consider the change reasonable based on the technological shift over the intervening years, which conceivably allows firms to manage exponentially more data than was imaginable back in 1970 when the Bank Secrecy Act passed.

Lawyers for Manatt, Phelps and Phillips break down what extraterritorial application of U.S. law means for crypto markets.