US Government Printing Office Authenticates Need for eDocument Integrity

Adobe has won a large contract with the US Government Printing office to deploy digital signatures, a technology closely related to ProofSpace's own Transient-Key ProofMarks™. GPO has implemented the new digital seal of authenticity for their electronic documents, including last week's release of the FY2009 budget. The GPO said, "For almost 150 years, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has been the official disseminator of Government documents and has assured users of their authenticity. In the 21st century, the increasing use of electronic documents poses special challenges in verifying authenticity, because digital technology makes such documents easy to alter or copy, leading to multiple non-identical versions that can be used in unauthorized or illegitimate ways. To help meet the challenge of the digital age, GPO has begun implementing digital signatures to certain electronic documents on GPO Access (the GPOss online portal) that not only establish GPO as the trusted information disseminator, but also provide the assurance that an electronic document has not been altered since GPO disseminated it."