It's a testament to Discovery that the show told us all we needed to know to essentially predict how Culber would be saved way back in "The Wolf Inside." I've been suggesting that there was a missing scene in which Stamets holds the dying Culber and takes him into the network (Tilly's line that "That is not Paul Stamets" kind of set it up nicely), and it's nice to see that I wasn't crazy.
About Section 31: there seems to be some discomfort with their portrayal, but honestly? They've never been particularly secret. Heck, the entire senior staff of Deep Space Nine knew about Section 31. Sisko, Kira, Odo, Dax, Bashir, and O'Brien. The Section 31 of DS9 is ruthlessly effective, but also willing to expose itself to the most vital political and military actors in the Federation simply for the sake of recruiting a single person. They have admirals working with them. They are literally in the Federation Charter. They're a very open secret.
I'm reminded of the classic Le Guin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," in which the narrator describes a perfect utopia maintained only by the existence of one child in one cellar who suffers endlessly so that tranquility and idealism can be maintained. Everyone at some point goes to see the child and accepts its suffering as necessary for the continuation of utopia. But some people leave the utopia and walk away. What happens to those who walk away?
I suspect that the story Disco is telling is the story of those who walked away. I suspect that we're seeing an infinitely more realistic Section 31--one that a lot of people know about and choose to ignore--that even DS9 was too romantic to fully acknowledge. Maybe Disco is where the Federation rejects Section 31, sending it into a state of rogue disorder. But I'd contend that Section 31 was never all that unknown, and that the gulf between their presence in DS9 and Disco is fairly narrow, and explainable by the intervening century and even a slightly change in their status.
Edit: typo
About Section 31: there seems to be some discomfort with their portrayal, but honestly? They've never been particularly secret. Heck, the entire senior staff of Deep Space Nine knew about Section 31. Sisko, Kira, Odo, Dax, Bashir, and O'Brien. The Section 31 of DS9 is ruthlessly effective, but also willing to expose itself to the most vital political and military actors in the Federation simply for the sake of recruiting a single person. They have admirals working with them. They are literally in the Federation Charter. They're a very open secret.
I'm reminded of the classic Le Guin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," in which the narrator describes a perfect utopia maintained only by the existence of one child in one cellar who suffers endlessly so that tranquility and idealism can be maintained. Everyone at some point goes to see the child and accepts its suffering as necessary for the continuation of utopia. But some people leave the utopia and walk away. What happens to those who walk away?
I suspect that the story Disco is telling is the story of those who walked away. I suspect that we're seeing an infinitely more realistic Section 31--one that a lot of people know about and choose to ignore--that even DS9 was too romantic to fully acknowledge. Maybe Disco is where the Federation rejects Section 31, sending it into a state of rogue disorder. But I'd contend that Section 31 was never all that unknown, and that the gulf between their presence in DS9 and Disco is fairly narrow, and explainable by the intervening century and even a slightly change in their status.
Edit: typo
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And again, sorry, but welcome to how some of us TOS era fans felt in 1987 when the 'new/current' Star Trek show did reflect the version of Star Trek we would have liked. 
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