The example I gave involved a lot more than the pedestrian observation that "arbitrary strings can be interpreted to mean illegal stuff". And it did not in any way attempt the sleight-of-mind involved in the "it's all 1s and 0s" reduction.
My example involved explicitly stating the mathematical fact of a number's factors, requiring no steganographic reinterpretation. The crucial point is that the (boring mathematical) information about factors alone, with no further interpretation, suffices for the authorities' opponents to be tipped off. That is, all they have to do is search the web for "known semi-primes" and check them against public keys.
>It's an incredibly boring, and over-repeated statement that you can represent information as numbers and therefore you can have ILLEGAL NUMBERS!
Which wasn't my point at all; in the example I gave the numbers and encoding are not intended to represent anything other than the fact of a semi-prime's factorization.
>If you do so with the intent of breaking encryption I'm sure there are situations where it would be illegal.
>Intent, as is so often ignored when legal matters come up, is incredibly important.
It would actually be the breaking of the breaking of encryption. And I'm no so naive to think this would be a legally-defensibly way to circumvent snooping, to suppose that judges would just say, "herp derp, all you did was announce a semi-prime's factors, you're free to go!"
But it is a much less trivial example that you're making it out to be, and it is not at all the same as the OP's example, which required applying a specific encoding to an arbitrary string to get arbitrary meaning. In my example, it is nothing more and less than a mathematical fact that also happens to be used to conceal or authenticate data by other parties.