Britain’s spy agency GCHQ intervened to prevent the sixth instalment of the Harry Potter book series being leaked on the internet, it has emerged.
Nigel Newton, the founder of Bloomsbury Publishing, was contacted by GCHQ – better known for locating terrorists – a decade ago to relay fears that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince may have been leaked on the internet before its official publication date.
In an Australian radio interview last week, Mr Newton said: “We fortunately had many allies… GCHQ rang me up and said, ‘We’ve detected an early copy of this book on the internet.’ I got them to read a page to our editor and she said, ‘No, that’s a fake’.”
And this is supposed to justify the mass invasion of privacy and the total surveillance of everything we do: protecting book industry profits. Fuck that. GCHQ and its allies should be shut down.