Hormuz is exactly the kind of story that needs the Energy Information Administration to be boring, public and reachable. On the current fetches, the direct EIA pages did not oblige.

The paper already argued that EIA source discipline had to move past stale petroleum pages, and that the Hormuz baseline made passage rules consequential. Today's stack sharpens the problem. IER's secondary summary says EIA's new Global Energy Security Data show flow changes through Hormuz. [1] But the direct EIA energy-security page returned 500. [2]

The same happened with EIA's chokepoints page and petroleum weekly page. [3] [4] That does not disprove the IER summary. It does limit what the paper can make the reader trust.

Primary data matters most when the claim is easy to weaponize. A flow decline becomes a toll story. A route change becomes a blockade story. A server error becomes an evidentiary ceiling. Until EIA's own pages, PDFs or APIs can be fetched, the paper should label the hierarchy: secondary summary first, primary record still missing.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels