Harry Porter Release Date: Harry Potter Book Gets National Security Guard To Prevent Leaks

By R. Siva Kumar - 13 Apr '16 06:59AM

The greatest wizarding surveillance is being conducted on a yet-to-be-published Harry Potter book. It is the only body that can control the risk of the book getting leaked into the raging public.

The book has been under the careful eye of the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which usually deals only with top secrets involving national security.

A strange message startled Bloomsbury, publishers of the Harry Potter series. Having got an unexpected phone call from GCHQ cautioning it that an online copy might leak into the public, it was motivated to plug the leak and was also careful about any spoilers.

Co-founder of Bloomsbury, Nigel Newton, spoke to Richard Fidler for the ABC's "Conversations" program and said that readers have never shown so much of a rage for any book series except Harry Potter. The publishers are hoping that they can stop any other leak.

He recalled people celebrating another book that she released: "I remember Jo Rowling phoning me once after she'd delivered a new book, saying 'please Nigel will you release the name of the title, because I have people outside searching my trash can looking for bits of paper.' At about that time we had to go into a complete security lockdown because people were trying to steal the manuscript," said Newton.

During another security breach, one guard just shot some blank rounds at a journalist who was attempting to sell some stolen sheets. Sun sent a scribe with £5000 in order to buy an unpublished copy of the book.

Alsatians and German Shepherds were let loose patrolling the printing works so that leaks could be stopped just before the fifth Harry Potter book was released.

A large chunk of the credit for preventing leaks, this time, can go to GCHQ. Otherwise, the global craze for the book would have died out with its availability, much before its release.

When asked to comment, GCHQ spokesman quipped: "We do not comment on our defence against the dark arts."