Though the idea of a “digital stamp” had been bandied about before, there was never any one person appointed to make it happen. For that, they’d need the skills of one Digital Service member in the Rosslyn room: Stephanie Grosser, self-proclaimed “bureaucracy ninja.”

Grosser isn’t a coder, but in this case, the actual coding wasn’t the primary obstacle: It was getting the bureaucratic green light that—legally, security-wise, privacy-wise—each manual mark an officer makes in a file that’s at least 17 pages long could have a digital equivalent.