President Obama is committed to an open government where citizens can go online and see what government is doing. But now comes warnings from security experts who say that being too open can be risky and can make it hard to keep information from getting out to the wrong places.

This caution follows the accidental release last month of a document on the U.S. Government Printing Office website that listed all U.S. civilian nuclear sites along with details about them.

The sudden warnings from security experts come as federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced plans to make 100,000 data sources available to the public on Data.gov. And that means the floodgates will be opened with thousands of documents previously unavailable to the public.

With the prospects of more openness come more headaches for IT executives at every federal agency. I don't think I need to tell you to be careful, and to put safety nets in place to ensure sensitive data does not become a public embarrassment. But being forewarned is forearmed.

For more on the perils of open government:
- check out this Computerworld article