Re: Secret Keeper


ag30476@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
....

"an immensely complex spell involving the magical concealment of a
secret inside a single, living soul. The information is hidden inside
the chosen person, or Secret-Keeper, and is henceforth impossible to
find -- unless, of course, the Secret-Keeper chooses to divulge it"
(Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

In other words, a secret (eg, the location of a family in hiding, like
the Potters) is enchanted so that it is protected by a single Keeper
(in our example, Peter Pettigrew, a.k.a. Wormtail). Thenceforth nobody
else - not even the subjects of the secret themselves - can divulge
the secret. Even if one of the Potters had been captured, force fed
Veritaserum or placed under the Imperius Curse, they would not have
been able to give away the whereabouts of the other two. The only
people who ever knew their precise location were those whom Wormtail
had told directly, but none of them would have been able to pass on the
information.

I think I understand it better now.

I originally thought that the FC only behaved as in your second
paragraph.
But actually the first paragraph involves a stronger effect. The
two paragraphs are not synonymous.

The second paragraph is a limited charm:
it only refers to human communication,
and it only affects people who know the secret.
It says that once PP became the SC, nobody else who
knew the secret beforehand could divulge it.
And nobody else who learned it from PP afterward
could divulge it. Only PP could divulge it.
If anyone else tried to divulge it,
either their words would magically vanish in air unheard, or the
recipient would magically forget or misunderstand
what was said. The latter probably happened in Book 6 when
Harry divulged openly that 12GP was the headquarters of
the OOTP in front of the Dursleys -- Harry spoke
the words, but somehow the "information" never
made it into the Dursleys' brains -- instant Obliviation.

But the first paragraph is a much, much, stronger
magical effect than the second paragraph, since
it not only forbids the *divulging* of the secret
by the finite number of people who already know it,
but it also forbids the *discovery* of the secret
by anybody via any means, even means that don't involve
having people betray the secret. I originally didn't
understand that this was part of the definition of the FC,
since the name of the charm implied it had to
do with trust and a defense against betrayal.

The first paragraph implies that the *information* itself,
rather than the *divulging* of the information
is controlled. Therefore, even an independent
investigation wouldn't discover the secret, because
the "information" contained therein was localized
in one spot and couldn't be re-created. An example
from my field (computer science) is cryptography: because
factorizing a large number is hard (even though
checking that a particular pair of numbers are factors
is easy), the factors are often used as a "secret" key --
e.g. for encryption. The
FC would prevent someone from ever, even by
random trial-and-error, guessing/testing the factors. If
he ever tried to guess the factors, he'd forget them
before he got around to checking that their product
equalled the original large number. I assume that
there must be barriers preventing misuse of this
on small enough numbers -- imagine putting the
FC on the fact that 3 and 5 are the factors of 15,
and hereby preventing anyone in the future learning that!

So if the FC is performed often enough, and Secret Keepers
die with their secrets, information will slowly and irretrievably
leak out of the universe. The world will literally fill up
with "lost keys" that nobody can find!

--
Rob Strom

.

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