A new memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) details a new requirement for all federal agencies to assess aspects of their information security in the wake of a series of embarrassing disclosures by WikiLeaks. The memo directs agencies to consider 11 pages of questions relating to information security procedures, including whether employees are required to report contacts with journalists. Transparency advocates have criticized some aspects of OMB's strategy as potentially damaging to open government.

2010 was a banner year for government transparency, with many significant advances and only a few disappointments. However, there were other events outside the world of government openness that seeped into the collective consciousness, and one of the most notable was the rise of the Tea Party in American politics. For this year-in-review article, we decided to take a somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach to assessing and commenting on events in government openness, playing off the theme of tea. Thus, we present to you … the Teas of Transparency.

On Nov. 4, President Obama signed a new executive order on controlled unclassified information (CUI), reforming the system of safeguarding information that is not classified but is still considered "sensitive." Previous practices for handling CUI stymied public access and inhibited information sharing inside government. The new order has been praised by numerous government openness advocates.