Data quality and systems theory

In the movie War Games, set in the U.S. Strategic Air Command Center under a mountain near Colorado Springs, there is a critical scene: on a huge map of the globe are arrows indicating large numbers of nuclear missiles approaching the U.S. from the Soviet Union. The military official in charge is trying to decide if he should ask the President for permission to launch a retaliatory attack because the technicians are telling him the threat is real. At this point, the scientist who originally designed the system (and who knows that something is wrong with the system itself) says, "General, what you see on that board is not reality, it is a computer-generated hallucination!".