One of the District’s biggest open government fights of 2011 was over the D.C. Fire & EMS Twitter feed. Yes, a Twitter feed. Authorities apparently could not cotton to a useful social media tool and didn’t appreciate the fact that public information officer Pete Piringer was giving real-time updates on fires and car crashes. So they shut it down in October and sent Piringer packing for an out-of-the way city agency. Any government action that restricts the flow of information is sure to rile up journalists, but the outpouring of love for Piringer from the city’s ink-stained wretches was something to behold. (WTOP’s Mark Segraves, for example: “Now the public will be left to rely on someone else to tell them what’s burning in their neighborhoods.”) The city also started encrypting police scanner transmissions around the same time, but that didn’t get quite the same traction among myopic little journalistic twits.