I finally finished my re-read of the Harry Potter series. It took a month to work my way through all seven books but it was enjoyable, and the last two books are simply excellent! Today’s post will focus on one small aspect of the final book: the Taboo.
As Voldemort and his minions take over the Ministry of Magic, to hunt down their opponents, they enchant the name ‘Voldemort’ with a Taboo. If someone were to say the name out loud, their location will be betrayed, and the bad guys will apparate (teleport) to the location to capture or eliminate the good guys who have formed the resistance. It’s a clever strategy because no one would say Voldemort’s name by mistake. His followers call him ‘the Dark Lord’. Everyone else calls him ‘You-Know-Who’, and only those who oppose him dare call him Voldemort.
Instead of Hermione who usually has the role of explaining things, it’s Ron that breaks the news to Harry: “… the name’s been jinxed… that’s how they track people! Using his name breaks protective enchantments, it causes some kind of magical disturbance – it’s how they found us in Tottenham Court Road… anyone who says it is trackable – quick-and-easy way to find Order [of the Phoenix] members.”
Back in the third book, we encountered a GPS-like tracker, the Marauder’s Map. In that case, it’s as if everyone carried a tracker with them and as long as they were in known locations of Hogwarts, they would be observable on the Map. The Room of Requirement, presumably unplottable, does not show up and anyone in it cannot be tracked. It takes a while for Harry to puzzle this out in the sixth book in his vain search for Malfoy. In the seventh book, Hermione and Ron disappear from the Map because they have gone down into the Chamber of Secrets to destroy a Horcrux. So maybe the tracker analogy isn’t as accurate. The Map is more akin to a Security Room that has cameras showing all known locations and can tag (using some sort of facial recognition?) everyone in its view. I applaud the Map’s creators for their nifty magic which has its counterpart in today’s I-Spy technology.
The Taboo works something like that. The technological equivalent is a mass of satellites or cellphone towers covering all plot-able ground, that can receive signals from anyone carrying an appropriate device. But instead of an actual device, the signals received are sound waves. And if a pattern of soundwaves – Voldemort’s spoken name – is detected, an alert is sent to the bad guys that they’ve likely found a member of the resistance. For a while, our three heroes avoid using his name because of Ron’s insistence that it is bad luck even before they’ve found out about the Taboo. An exception to this was when they were in Grimmauld Place and Voldemort’s name was spoken freely. But because the old Black residence was unplottable, it seems the Taboo wasn’t triggered. I suspect the same would apply to the Room of Requirement.
Technologically, if the government was hunting for a fugitive, and had satellites or cell-phone towers gathering huge amounts of data, the strategy would be to find some signature that will lead to pinpointing the fugitive. This would require sifting through huge amounts of data. You want the identifying signature to be simple but unique. The Taboo is well-chosen in that regard. Perhaps this says something about the limits of magic. Coming up with a spell that will automatically allow you to find a particular individual wherever they are must be very challenging – although it can be done in a limited space as proved by the Marauder’s Map. Could a larger scale Map be conjured? I don’t know. But given what some countries are doing now with their technology to essentially spy on anyone within their borders, it’s already happening in our world. How can one make themselves unplottable in this new world? I don’t know, but the battle between surveillance and privacy from it rages on.
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