Yesterday's Enterprise Episode question

[Timo]

Yeah, various professional writers (resident ones included) have made that one up... But it seems that somebody has misunderstood what they concocted. An organization operating out of the "regular timeline" would only protect knowledge of that timeline from corruption such as the sudden emergence of a Klingon War timeline or the sudden erasing of toothpicks from history, and would not have access to the multitude of other possible courses of history, including the 2½th Romulan War, the Clone War (with custard pies) or the Terminally Dull Peace, all of which also involved a Picard of some sort.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

The DTI has shielded records which are protected from temporal erasure, so they could actually access data from the timeline that was the alternate one with the Klingon war. They just might ask Picard that very thing.

Awww... c'mon... you made that up!

Actually William Leisner made it up in his story "Gods, Fate, and Fractals" in the anthology Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II. I then elaborated on it in my novel DTI: Watching the Clock. However, Timo's right -- the shielded records can't access information from alternate timelines. They're nothing more than what the name says. The DTI keeps records of events in its own timeline, and if that timeline is changed, the records are shielded against alteration, so the DTI agents in the altered timeline are able to discover that it's been altered (assuming the alteration takes place after the creation of the shielded records). They're just a protected archive of data from the "home" timeline. They aren't some crystal ball that gives the DTI knowledge of events in every timeline.

The loss of the Enterprise-C took place decades before the shielded records came into use in the novel continuity, so it's not a timeline that the DTI would have any knowledge of, except through Sela's unverified testimony to Picard in "Redemption, Part II."

 

[DonIago]

I am vaguely amused by the notion of Dulmer and Lucsly chewing out Picard for sending the E-C back into the rift though.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

This didn't stop Captain Braxton from getting arrested for "crimes you are going to commit" in Relativity.

But that wasn't by the (civilian) DTI, but by the Starfleet Temporal Integrity Commission five centuries in the future. In my novel DTI: Watching the Clock, I paint the TIC as coming from a time when the Federation's ethical standards have eroded considerably.

DTI, as depicted in the similarly named books, is a gathering of elitist a$$holes (despite the obvious intent to the contrary):
They immediately and utterly rejected the idea of saving, by temporal intervention, tens of billions of sentients (just recently killed), but when it came to the death of a single one of their own, temporal intervention to save her life was suddenly on the table as a viable option.
There's not much ethical standard there to be eroded.

 

[R. Star]

This didn't stop Captain Braxton from getting arrested for "crimes you are going to commit" in Relativity.

But that wasn't by the (civilian) DTI, but by the Starfleet Temporal Integrity Commission five centuries in the future. In my novel DTI: Watching the Clock, I paint the TIC as coming from a time when the Federation's ethical standards have eroded considerably.

DTI, as depicted in the similarly named books, is a gathering of elitist a$$holes (despite the obvious intent to the contrary):
They immediately and utterly rejected the idea of saving, by temporal intervention, tens of billions of sentients (just recently killed), but when it came to the death of a single one of their own, temporal intervention to save her life was suddenly on the table as a viable option.
There's not much ethical standard there to be eroded.

Stalin did have a point when he said, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

You can personally identify with that single person, whereas a million dead it's hard to wrap your mind around. Whatever else you want to say about Stalin, he understood the human nature that much.

 

[DonIago]

For better or worse, the removal of that one individual hadn't altered the timeline except for their absence from it. Obviously the deaths of billions of people is a different matter.

Also, saving those billions of individuals would most likely result in a galaxy ultimately controlled by the Borg. How exactly is that a victory?

 

[Timo]

Depends on what sort of victories the DTI is tasked with securing, if any, I guess. Are they the police, or the medics, or the army, or all in one package along with the judge and the jury?

The Council apparently is worried about Starfleet captains making excessively independent decisions over life and death. Do they have armed guards placed behind the backs of all DTI workers, with the fingers on the triggers, and the phrase "Please think that over, clear it with the Council, and you may live to see it happen" well memorized? That would sound prudent.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Edit_XYZ]

For better or worse, the removal of that one individual hadn't altered the timeline except for their absence from it. Obviously the deaths of billions of people is a different matter.

Also, saving those billions of individuals would most likely result in a galaxy ultimately controlled by the Borg. How exactly is that a victory?

A galaxy ultimately controlled by the borg? Hardly.
I can easily come up with a way to save an arbitrarily high number of people without changing the past in any way.
For example:
Simply use a temporal transporter (a technology shown in TNG) to teleport all the billions who were about to die from a millisecond before their death to their future (your present).

Of course, the reasoning behind the DTI's categorical refusal to save billions was not the impossibility of doing it without undesirable consequences, but the fact that that would constitute changing the past (and not changing the past was shown to be the de fato religion of the DTI agents - the logical justifications of this credo being quite thin).
Until one of the DTI's own was to be saved, that is; then the refusal was not even close to categorical.
As per the DTI agents' behaviour, all people are equal, but some are more equal than others.
As said - elitist a$$holes.

[..]the judge and the jury?

The DTI certainly do think they are so.

[..]Do they have armed guards placed behind the backs of all DTI workers, with the fingers on the triggers[..]

Except there are no such guards (or they are utterly/absolutely undetectable and never do something regardless of the situation).