How Star Trek Explains The NSA -- Brian Fung, National Journal
Star Trek has a pretty good track record of forecasting the future. Cell phones, tablets, augmented-reality visors. But who would have thought that the franchise's darkest vision would be the next to come true?
The original series, featuring Captain Kirk, is perhaps best known for its utopianism—imagining a universe where materialism has given way to altruism, political self-determination and a postracial society. The show's successor, The Next Generation, envisions matter and energy as freely convertible, and capitalism is regarded as a distasteful artifact of the 20th century.
But that model gets turned on its head in one of Star Trek's most popular series, Deep Space Nine. The show is set in the midst of a galactic war in which terrorism makes an appearance, alliances are broken, and many of the values that held Kirk's Federation together are threatened from within. As a part of the new, darker era, the show's producers created Section 31, an intelligence agency and special-operations outfit that's nominally controlled by the Federation but operates independently of it.
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My Comment: Hmmmm .... something to think about this weekend.