This has nothing to do with law lagging behind technology. Even before computers, the ability to express language in a number was well known. If someone turned

This has nothing to do with law lagging behind technology. Even before computers, the ability to express language in a number was well known. If someone turned a defamatory sentence into a number and spread that number together with the key to turn it into the sentence, then they would be just as guilty of defamation as when they had spread the original sentence. I surely hope you do not advocate getting rid of all laws that deal with information that could be expressed in a number, because you feel it should not count as the same incriminating information, just because it was masked with some mathematics?