Though at the same time while we've gotten used to banks lagging horribly on tech, given their resources and the sensitivity of the information they deal with an argument can be made that they should be leading not lagging and that cost cutting and lack of leadership interest aren't great excuses for delays. I do think by 2015 yeah that was getting kind of bad. On the other hand, the penalty wasn't much ($35m in 2022 would be worth a lot less to them working back 7 years). It might still have been cheaper to setup FDE back then. Optimistically, there may be Morgan Stanley clients well off enough to mount real private lawsuits or at least take quite a lot of money elsewhere if they're irritated enough, so while this penalty alone might not be much of a lesson about PII perhaps they'll still come to regret it a little :\.
I wasn't working in IT so I have no idea what corporate policy was like at the time, but it was highly recommended in hacker circles. It can't have been that hard.
In the early 2000's, any sort of encryption was a non-trivial burden on already slow (by today's standards) systems. Plus the whole export encryption fiasco and more.
I'd say FDE didn't really take off until your mobile devices started to offer it by default, and make it easy enough that regular users don't ever need to think about it. Now pretty much all operating systems support FDE "out of the box".
Saying folks should have been running FDE back in the early 2000's is just absurd, really.
