[eigenspace]

Well, a national ID number isnt usually publicly available info, even if it can be obtained by the US government through illicit means.

But yeah, it does sound that way, but certainly not clear cut to me what the situation is. I.e. does the agreement involve clauses about what to do if this is abused? Do we have a way to detect if theyre using this on non-travellers? Etc.

[T-A]

> a national ID number isnt usually publicly available info

A couple of counterexamples:

Italy's "fiscal code" is generated with a simple algorithm which can be executed manually:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fiscal_code

Sweden's "personal identity number" is public information and can be looked up by anyone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed...

[sam_lowry_]

Belgian National Number is your birth date, then an increment from 1 to 999 for every baby born that day, then a base-97 checksum.

[andruby]

Not sure if still the case: odd numbers for males and even numbers for females.

This also means a person’s Belgian RRN can change.

[sam_lowry_]

Yep, but they do not change on sex change, IIRC.

[andruby]

I wrote a system for a medical lab decades ago and IIRC I did actually have to change some RRN's manually. It's been a while so I'm not 100% sure, but I do think the changes were due to switching gender.

[port11]

Are there never more than 1k babies born in a day?

[treszkai]

With a population of 12M and life expectancy of 80 years (give or take), probably not, as that needs ~400 newborns a day to maintain, and the birth rate is probably well below that, like in most Western countries.

[port11]

Back-of-the-napkin math supports that, but baby births aren’t uniformly distributed. Well, anyway, I’m sure they thought about it. Thanks for explaining how I got my Belgian ID number!

[sam_lowry_]

For the curious, there is a lot more about National Numbers in this pdf: https://www.ibz.rrn.fgov.be/sites/default/files/documents/nl...

[dinkelberg]

This is the leaked draft: https://statewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/wk_5183_20...

It's not clear how it is supposed to work in detail. But it sounds like it could be implemented in a way that makes illegitimate queries possible. It doesn't sound like they want to really ensure that you can catch those.

[meibo]

In multiple European countries, national ID numbers are public information that can be searched by name and address (i.e. Sweden)

[iknowstuff]

I played with Estonia’s e-residency and they use asymmetric cryptography for everything so the ID is public but does nothing without the corresponding private key.