This new century presents new threats to our society, not least of which is the spread of illegal numbers: numbers which are dangerous by themselves, or those that can be interpreted as dangerous information. Pretty much any number falls into the second group, and unfortunately we can’t ban them all yet, so only individual numbers are currently prohibited in the civilized world. A police officer agreed to give us an interview on this topic.
The Asocial (A): We’re all set. Could you briefly explain to our audience the dangers of illegal numbers?
Police Officer (P): Sure. Illegal numbers, and illegal primes in particular, undermine the values on which our society is built. One day kids play with them, the next day they hijack an airplane to get more.
A: Um, how are airplanes related?
P: Airplanes are valuable, and illegal numbers are expensive on black market – especially prime ones. Just this month we’ve raided a dealer, extracted enough money to buy a few islands.
A: I heard they are very careful, using cryptocurrencies and mixing services, operating over Tor, shipping with dead drops, and so on. How do you catch them?
P: Lots of surveillance, statistics, and analytics – quite an interesting process, actually. Though sometimes they just make mistakes, such as using the same place for a dead drop twice.
A: Okay, could you describe typical dealers and consumers?
P: Yeah, it’s quite simple: the dealers are all the same – be those number dealers, drug dealers, furniture dealers, or whatever: just some poor bastards who can’t do better, and don’t care. But the consumers are the real problem: those are disgusting low-life criminals without any morals. That’s why the punishment for possession is more severe than that for transmission alone.
A: How do you tell if one is in a possession of an illegal number?
P: Numbers can be stored on laptops, usb sticks, phones, and so on. With phones and most of the laptops it’s pretty easy: NSA performs the required checks to ensure that those are clear. If we see a suspicious usb stick, or an untracked laptop, we can extract it and send to an expertise.
A: What about the numbers that contain illegal ones? Like, the same bits, the same digits in their decimal representation, especially if a decimal representation is infinite, or just being larger than the illegal ones – containing them by the set-theoretic definition.
P: Currently it is unclear what to do with those, but if you ask me – those real and complex numbers are quite shady even without illegal ones. Pretty much everything can be solved by whitelisting allowed numbers instead of blacklisting illegal ones: limiting them to natural numbers, such as 0, 1, 2, 3… The next one is banned in China, but that’s enough for all the real-world tasks. And it should be prohibited to put them together, sum them, or do any other tricks, of course.
A: Okay, thanks for clarifying that to us.
P: No problem.
As one may see, the taxes don’t get wasted on something silly like mathematical research, but rather getting spent on the safety of citizens.