Harry Potter & Homeland Security

What a week. Tense. High alert. Massive security. Attempts to circumvent those security measures all over the world.

The latest Al-Qaeda threat?

No, just the release of the new Harry Potter book.

There are few more successful franchises in the world today than Harry Potter. What began some 17 years ago as an out-of-work effort by fledgling British writer J.K. Rowling, has now made her history’s first billionaire author. Aside from the more than 250 million books sold and six movies made, there are now plans for a Harry Potter theme park to be developed in (where else?) Florida. Move over, Magic Kingdom.

The release of the seventh, and what Rowling says will be the final book in the Harry Potter series (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”) has also generated a massive promotional blitz and buzz. The world has not seen this kind of build-up toward the roll-out of a new product since…well, since the iPhone’s debut a couple of weeks ago.

Hey, but still.

The book’s public release has been mapped out with military precision. On July 21, at exactly 12:01am (“Western European Summer Time”, no less), the book ships and goes on sale across each succeeding western-speaking time zone. (When does China get it, a week from now?)

No less impressive has been the extraordinary security put in place to forestall leaks about the book prior to its release. Yes, there have been breaches. Pages of the book appeared mysteriously on the internet, the front cover has been, well, uncovered for weeks now, and one unlucky distributor even shipped its allotment early, for which it is being sued. You don’t play around with Potter.

But for the most part, in a day and age when security measures seem to exist only as templates to be tested, the Potter Plan held. For example, Amazon.com workers described a near-Defcon-Five state of readiness, with guards standing 24/7 over palettes of Potter books in cordoned-off areas of a special warehouse. They didn’t even have to say, “Bring ‘em on.” Mission accomplished. For real.

Such flawless preparation and rigid security only served to inspire envy when the other story of the week involving security broke. That would be the unsettling story beckoning from the non-fiction section of our lives. The Bush administration’s own intelligence analysts reported that Al-Qaeda is not only alive and thriving, but is stronger than ever and still very much determined to carry out a large-scale attack inside the American homeland. All this a full six years after 9/11, hundreds of billions spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 7000 American lives lost, and countless more wounded and maimed.

That’s some security.

Maybe the Bush folks should talk to the Potter folks, who appear to have written the book on competent preparation and effective vigilance. After all, Harry Potter was secured and protected.
At least someone is.