Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. Encryption is more than just mathematical functions, it's the application of mathematical functions. And the application is what matters, because it would be easy to say a Nuclear weapon is just physics or that a bio-weapon is just chemistry. Clearly, how you use basic principles matters.
It isn't like Nuclear weapons, though, because every single computer has everything you need to do full encryption. Nuclear weapons require materials, manufacturing, etc. Nuclear weapons require both the knowledge and the physical world parts.... encryption just requires the knowledge, which is impossible to put back in the box.
Every computer is capable of building software that can bring society to its knees, but most people don't know how to do it. Software is just algorithms, after all.
The problem is that law enforcement pushes the bad uses of something without weighing it with the good. If fertilizer can be used to make bombs, should be ban fertilizer? No, that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unfortunately, many voters don't fully understand what the baby is WRT encryption, they just see child porn, human trafficking, etc.