Perhaps I phrased it poorly - what I meant was that one can view the Home Secretary's requests for less privacy as a fact of life (just as death and taxes), and could consider refusing these requests as part of civic duty. You're correct, the HS usually turns somewhat authoritarian (regardless of whether it is their job to or not) - it is simply the public's duty to resist.
It is the duty of the Home Secretary (and the UK's various nosey institutions - e.g. intelligence agencies, police, etc) to continuously badger us for this information - unfortunately, it's pretty much part of the job description.
It is our duty, as the public, to continuously say "no".
Disregarding any negative consequences, their motivations are pretty transparent - there's little doubt that being able to read everyone's private messages will enable the intelligence services to better do their jobs. However, as Edward Snowden and others have already shown to us many times over the last few years, the UK government can't be trusted with this responsibility - and that this is probably the thin end of the wedge. Britain is already the closest thing that Europe has to a surveillance state, and the number of people killed in the UK by terrorism is vanishingly small - we are hundreds of times more likely to die in a car accident. Is it really worth giving up the last vestiges of our privacy for a little bit more security?
> A standard test in brain damage research involves dropping brass weights on the heads of anesthetized rats, then inspecting their brains for tearing in the connections between nerve cells.
Actually, that's a good point - I hadn't considered the legal ramifications of such a stance. It's interesting that you mention people seeking damages from the creator of the car's software, because that makes the entire situation more complex.
As for the concept of "safer to the community as a whole" - well, the idea is that they're a safer product overall, and this is mostly targeted at the individual (i.e. "if you own a self-driving car, you're less likely to die"). If people have the knowledge that their cars may (in certain situations) elect to kill them in preference of others, then I doubt that self-driving cars will sell particularly well.
I (perhaps somewhat naively) assumed that a self-driving car would be programmed to prioritise the occupants of the vehicle (as that most closely emulates the likely reactions of a human driver in that situation).
Self-driving cars are likely to be safer than human drivers anyway, so one has to consider how much risk there is of a situation like the Trolley Problem arising - i.e. not much.
Brilliant post, thanks for the information. I had no idea that Mou was so sketchy! As it turns out, I've stopped using Mou because some of the functionality is quite buggy (e.g. it appears that the "save" function executes in the control thread and uses a blocking save operation - because the application freezes for several seconds when saving).
On your advice, I've now switched to MacDown and I'm really very pleased with it indeed.