"The Federation claims to abhor Section 31's tactics, but when they need the dirty work done, they look the other way," says Odo, one of the characters on Deep Space Nine. "It's a tidy little arrangement, wouldn't you say?"

There are caveats, but it's not a stretch to say now that we're living DS9, or some form of it. The revelation that the National Security Agency is scooping up every American's e-mails, photographs, videos, voice-over-IP calls, and more from telcos such as Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon but also from nine major tech companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook, and possibly from credit-card companies as well—all in the name of protecting America—strikes many as a subversion of U.S. values and of the authority the public thought it was granting its government in the wake of 9/11.

Likely if Section 31 were disclosed to the broader Federation, the outfit would be shuttered immediately (or maybe not, considering how powerful its key members are). While there's no chance that NSA will be closed, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has vowed to introduce legislation paring back some of the laws that enabled NSA to create its electronic domestic surveillance program.

Another difference between DS9 and our world is that NSA is at least theoretically checked by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whereas Section 31 is entirely unaccountable to anyone—not Starfleet Intelligence, not Starfleet Command, not the Federation Council.

Still, the process by which the FISC oversees the NSA's surveillance requests is itself opaque. The public gets little more than annual reports on individual subpoenas submitted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Of course, any post about Star Trek demands that we take the analogy to its furthest point. Who are the Klingons in this drama? Who's our Odo? Our Sisko?

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Brian Fung is a former technology writer at National Journal. Connect Twitter