Harry Potter and the Spoiler of Secrets

"Fundamentally, you can't prevent a leak in distribution," said Schneier. "Because there's too many physical objects. You can protect the manuscript, you can maybe protect the production. In previous years, you could say [to distributors and retailers], 'If you leak it, you can't have the next one.' They can't do that with Book 7.

"There's no technology fix here. It's all about people. This works and fails based on trusted people. The problem is, in the later stages of the book, there's just too many people you have to trust."

Other security pros agreed that the thousand-dollar GPS trackers reportedly installed on delivery trucks or even on the boxes of books themselves would have had dubious security value at this stage of the game.

"As soon as things are in paper format, you have to accept it's going to be out of your control," said Roop. "From the publisher to the printing to the public release, they need to shorten that time frame as much as possible so that they can limit the risk of the paper books being in warehouses, and on trucks, and in the distributors' or retailers' hands. During that time frame you just have to admit to yourself that the potential for leakage is very high."

John Kindervag wonders if all the security hype might have actually had a role in causing the bit torrent leak.

"You have to wonder, did they make a target of themselves with that Time magazine article, by saying no one can get to it? Did they take someone who might not have been interested in doing that and challenge them? I don't know that you want to throw those challenges out to people," said the senior security architect at Vigilar, a Dallas-based solution provider.

Meanwhile, the one legitimately toothy security tool Scholastic still has during distribution -- its powerful legal reach -- has been wielded with increasing frequency as the 'magic moment' approaches.

On Wednesday, Scholastic stated that DeepDiscount.com, a customer of distributor Levy Home Entertainment, had shipped about 1,000 books to customers ahead of schedule. The publishing house promised "immediate legal action" against the distributor and retailer. Blogs and Web sites posting the pirated photo files of the book have been contacted with forcefully worded take-down notices from the publisher. Some sites have even claimed they were contacted by Scholastic for merely posting links to other sites containing such files.

These legal maneuverings raise an interesting question. The Harry Potter franchise may have spent tens of millions securing its magic moment, but how much will all the potential lawsuits wind up costing the public?

The Next Magic Moment

For future book releases of this nature, the experts suggest that a shift to on-demand publishing, where books are printed out on purchase, might be the most realistic way to secure a book's contents all the way up to the point of release. Other solutions -- like time-sensitive locks on reinforced book boxes or light-sensitive RFID strips inside the boxes that would emit a signal if opened -- were considered fun, but either insanely impractical or of dubious functionality.

Ironically, the medium that the 'Deathly Hallows' team had least control over may yet prove to be the best defense for Harry Potter's final magic moment, and future ones. Though Scholastic clearly fears the wild corners of the Internet where Harry Potter fandom speaks freely, it is exactly that wildness that has created spontaneous community shaming of leakers and an effective cloud of misdirection surrounding which spoilers are real and which are fake.

Speaking to ChannelWeb on the phone, Kindervag related just how deeply the devotion to Harry Potter runs.

"In this case, there's no bad publicity. I've got a 15-year-old daughter who's re-reading every Harry Potter book in anticipation of this. She's scared to death about this phone call, because I might somehow find out the ending and give it away. If I leaked that to her, then I'd be in much bigger trouble than Scholastic."