What if Weyoun used the Baseball card to emotionally blackmail Jake?

[DonIago]

In Starfleet's defense, I'm not sure they ever got much in the way of details on the plan...in fact, I can see this being a situation where the details were left intentionally vague.

I mean heck, Florida just enacted a bill to dissolve the Disney government district that was a whopping two pages long. My point being that, for better or worse, governments often create documentation that's less than fully fleshed out.

 

[kkt]

I agree that would very much be in the vein of DS9. You don't expect a Starfleet Captain to forge fake evidence the Dominion has plans to attack the Romulans, get some unknowing people that help you in your schemes killed ... and get some form of clearance for actually executing the plan for from Starfleet HQ, either.

DS9 hated to be predictable. That's one thing I love about it.

Sounds like a credible strategy and I'm sure such things have happened in the past.Still, does it fit Starfleet to expend the lives of their personnel in such a cynical gamble?

Yes, I'd love to be able to claim credit for inventing that strategy, but it's straight out of the British having broken the German cryptography system Enigma (thanks to Alan Turing) and thus Churchill was often reading important communications from the German field commanders and ships even before the German high command was. The British biggest concern was keeping their cryptography secret and not acting on so much intelligence that the Germans would guess their code was broken. If you haven't watched the movie The Imitation Game, it tells a good accessible story about it.

 

[DonIago]

I liked The Imitation Game more before I found out how many historical inaccuracies it contained, though the part about the British needing to act as though they hadn't broken Enigma seems to be based on fact (though not necessarily the specifics the film utilizes). I would also highly recommend "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson, which may also have inaccuracies but also discusses the need to sometimes not act on intelligence. It also has a lovely analogy for how Enigma works based on Turing's bicycle, and an interesting discussion of how easily apparent random number generation can become pseudorandom, among many other things.