What is a passport?
A passport is a travel document issued by a national government that usually identifies the bearer as a national of the issuing state, and requests that the bearer be permitted to enter and pass through other countries. A machine readable passport (MRP) is a passport where the data on the identity page is encoded in optical character recognition format. Many countries began to issue MRPs in the 1980s although the roll-out of the technology to smaller overseas missions was slow in many instances. Most travel passports world-wide are MRPs. They are standardized by the ICAO Document 9303 (endorsed by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission as ISO/IEC 7501-1) and have a special Machine Readable Passport Zone, which is usually at the end of a passport. It spans two lines and each line is 44 characters long. The following information is provided in the zone: name, passport number, two check digits, nationality, date of birth, sex,
