Signal in the News

When my cat woke me up this morning mewing for breakfast, I would not have guessed that the biggest story of the day would involve nonprofits. But here we are.

By now, you've probably heard that The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg got an invitation to a private Signal group where national security advisor Michael Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, vice president J.D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and others discussed future attacks on Yemen. (Honestly, if you haven't read the story, you should read it now.)

Signal, I should point out, is an open-source messaging app that boasts end-to-end encryption.

That said, it's an open-source messaging app. I suspect that discussing issues of national security over an off-the-shelf app violates the law. I know it violates best practices. And inviting a random journalist to this type of discussion absolutely demonstrates the highest level of incompetence.

But none of those things are within my professional wheelhouse. What is? Well, Signal describes itself as "an independent nonprofit. We're not tied to any major tech companies, and we can never be acquired by one either. Development is supported by grants and donations from people like you." And, in fact, if you look on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, you'll see that it's exempt under section 501(c)(3).

And honestly, I'm not completely clear which of the exemption categories it fits under. I did a quick Westlaw and Tax Notes search but failed to guess at search terms that would find its exemption PLR. And I know that the mission it states in its 990s--"PROTECT FREE EXPRESSION AND ENABLE SECURE GLOBAL COMMUNICATION THROUGH OPEN SOURCE PRIVACY TECHNOLOGY"--isn't one of the enumerated categories.

But it is nonetheless exempt. And now it's at the center of a massive story of terrible information security.

Samuel D. Brunson