> Then the question changes, and becomes: "can the US government compel a swiss national to make false statements".

Does it? They can't prevent the disclosure no matter what they do, but they know who they sent the NSL to. They may not be able to arrest the person who made it public, but they can still arrest the person who failed to keep it private.

Not if the person who "failed to keep it private" isn't subject to US law, they can't.

Why would they send an NSL to someone who isn't subject to US law?

You may not want to test that assertion :(

Without disclosing too much of your internal procedures, can you say if you have a mechanism in place to prevent an American being compelled by American courts to tell a Swiss national that it is okay to update the canary? Under a gag order, the American presumably cannot inform coworkers in other countries that they are under a gag order.

Unless you put the foreign nationals in charge. In that case if their cooperation is needed for compliance with the order you have to tell them or they could just reject.

True, you just need to assign them enough authority that their approval is a technical requirement for compliance. You would then have to rely on them evaluating the provenance of the order and stopping any canary related activity if they get an order that is suspect.

I don't think it is an unsolvable problem, it just takes some tricky thinking to implement if you have more than one person in your organization.

> "can the US government compel a swiss national to make false statements"

I don't think anyone can compel Switzerland to do anything. They've been militarily neutral since as long as I can remember and if Wikipedia be believed, every male in the country has military training. I'd say there's very little the U.S. (or anyone else for that matter) could do to compel them to do anything. Especially being as if the U.S. wanted to do anything more than issue a stiffly worded letter, they'd bring the entire wrath of Europe crashing down on their heads... which may or may not include a number of their greatest allies. That wouldn't be very bright politically.

"a swiss national" does not mean "the swiss national government", it means a citizen of Switzerland. Nobody is talking about invading Switzerland to force the government to do something they're vehemently opposed to; they're talking about cooperating with the Swiss government to compel a swiss national to do something. Whether or not this is feasible in this case is another question, but I have no idea how you suddenly flew off into a fantasy world of conjecture about the US considering an invasion of Switzerland.

As an example more in line with what the parent comment was describing, just look at what's happened to Swiss banking. Their reputation as a reliable tax haven has been horribly shaken by the US DoJ's pursuit of banks engaging in this kind of activity, and this was done with the cooperation of the Swiss government. This is the kind of compulsion that is being discussed here; compulsion with the express cooperation of the foreign government (even if this cooperation was gained through the application of diplomatic pressure).