GPO has been in the passport production business for nearly a century. In 1920, when the League of Nations began establishing international standards for passports, the United States Government turned to GPO for secure production of the then-new booklet-style documents. Ever since, GPO has been the trusted sole provider of U.S. passports. For decades, passport standards were primarily status quo and, accordingly, production was business as usual. In the 1980s, passports began incorporating optical character recognition (OCR) machine-readable data and holograms. In 2003, GPO began working on supporting a new type of passport into which would be embedded a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag comprising a computer chip containing critical information used for authentication and an antenna for signal receipt and transmission.
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