[SkyBelow]

>In these discussions about the government being able to decrypt stuff, are we, in effect, suggesting that certain math be made illegal?

All images are binary. All binary is just a number. We have made many such numbers illegal and even have software that will detect them and report you when you share the number with such number sharing services (dropbox, facebook, etc).

So making math illegal sounds entirely possible.

[thomastjeffery]

You are talking about data, so following that logic, what would be made illegal would be implementations not algorithms.

Math can be represented in a variety of ways, but the pattern being described is immutable.

What A.G. Barr is insinuating is not that we make implementations illegal, but that we make the use of algorithms categorically illegal.

[SkyBelow]

While I don't know of any, had someone made an algorithm that could generate such illegal numbers I suspect it would be considered illegal from the first day of its existence.