Don't get what's different about this one. We've had SSN's since most of us were born. All they're saying is that the numbers will be random now, except that they WON'T issue numbers starting with 666 or 9 or ending in all 0's. There's a public fear of the numbers "666" (to the level that I've seen people whose total came up to that at a cash register buy something else to change it), so avoiding it in things like license plates and social security numbers helps to keep the peace.
Truthfully, with the importance the number has, a 9 digit numerical code is just not unique enough IMHO to protect someone's identity. Most of our passwords on the internet are more complex. We should be looking at AT LEAST 9 digits (12+ would be better - complexity increases exponentially with each digit), and we should use case sensitive alpha and numeric characters.
To put into perspective, as far as possible unique combinations we have -
9-digit numeric code:
1,000,000,000 possible combinations
12-digit case sensitive alpha numeric code:
3,226,266,762,397,899,821,056 possible combinations
Take a gander as to which would be harder to guess.