[Cryptography] Speculation considered harmful?

[Henry Baker]

[Believe it or not, this post is relevant to the topic of speculation, but I'm not intending any political content.]

Senator Dianne Feinstein released the testimony from the "Fusion GPS" founder yesterday, because several of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had already made public statements saying that they wouldn't vote against releasing it.  Therefore Senator Feinstein *speculated* that the release would be OK, and proceeded to release it prior to gaining permission from the Committee.

So I attempted to access this file using Tor and got the following error message:

'Access Denied

'You don't have permission to access "http://serve-403-cf.www.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/3/9/3974a291-ddbe-4525-9ed1-22bab43c05ae/934A3562824CACA7BB4D915E97709D2F.simpson-transcript-redacted.pdf" on this server.'

[Presumably, senate.gov doesn't want to serve up potentially embarrassing content to foreign requestors.]

Curiously, simply asking Tor for a "New Tor Circuit for this Site" resulted in yet another similar error message, but this time *the pdf file proceeded to download ANYWAY* !!

So Senator Feinstein and the senate.gov web site are both guilty of a Spectre-like speculation bug!