Confronting Digital Age Head-On

The Future Digital System will respond to that trend by making available online all 2.2 million government documents -- a total of 60 million pages -- by the end of the 2007, tagged by keywords so they can be easily searched. It is a nearly $30 million endeavor and will include documents all the way back to the nation's founding.

The secure and intelligent documents unit is working to ensure that digital documents are certified as authentic and that important documents are extremely difficult to counterfeit, something that has posed more of a problem as technologies have emerged to assist counterfeiters.

If you order a document directly from GPO, and "the brown envelope with a GPO stamp comes to your door," you can be sure it is authentic, James said. But with digital documents, "you have no way of knowing that what you receive is what the author wrote."

The GPO's boldest ongoing project is not happening at headquarters. It is happening somewhere nearby, in an undisclosed location, where a new U.S. passport is being developed.

The State Department asked the GPO to create the new passport as part of an effort to further secure entry points into the United States. The new passport will include advanced anti-counterfeiting markings and a computer chip and antenna built into the cover. That will allow a border agent to slide the passport over an electronic reader that will display the passport holder's information on a monitor.

Privacy advocates raised concerns almost as soon as the new passport was announced in early 2004. The concerns focused on the chip and antenna, a technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID), which advocates fear could be scanned by identity thieves and other criminals.

"The big issue with the RFID passport is the tag or chip will contain the same personal information as is available in human readable form in the passport," said Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We think there's a real privacy issue to having the U.S. government requiring anyone traveling internationally to carry this kind of information [which] could be checked surreptitiously."

Frank E. Moss, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary for consular affairs, said the passport is being tested again by an independent government agency before final certification, and that "the front cover contains anti-skimming materials as long as the book is closed or mostly closed." Distribution is planned for this summer.

At the center of this debate is the GPO, which is responsible for contracting with a chip vendor and assembling the passport book. James said that finding a vendor has included challenges. Similar issues may come up with new uniform government IDs, which also have internal RFID chips. A report by the Government Accountability Office raised questions about whether agencies preparing to implement the new ID would be able to by this fall because of technological and other limitations.

James eventually would like to move GPO from its North Capitol Street home "into a new facility designed and equipped for the 21st century." Congress is likely to slow that effort.

To Michael F. DiMario, a 30-year veteran of the printing office whom James replaced, this all sounds familiar. "We were under a very high demand from the Congress for many years to shrink the agency," he said. "The goal of Congress was not to build IT departments."