Last week, the state Attorney General warned that a man named Iqbal Khowaja had been telling people that he was Hawaiʻi’s Chief Technology Officer. He is not. Yet he had been booked for speaking slots at the Consumer Electronics Show and at the Bitcoin Conference. There he offered thoughts on the future of technology under a title for an office that doesn’t exist.
The con is almost charming in its modesty. CTO sounds important. CTO of Hawaiʻi — the state that processed unemployment claims during COVID on a mainframe from the 1980s — is a thinner prize. Whatever Khowaja was after, world domination was not on the menu.
And yet the trick worked long enough for him to walk onto serious stages and into the news cycle.
We have been told for two years now that the great threat of artificial intelligence is the deepfake. It is a faked video of a candidate, released forty-eight hours before a close election, in which he appears to say or do something disqualifying. The technology is real, and the stakes of a swing race justify the cost. Foreign adversaries have neither scruples nor borders.
Hawaiʻi tried to address the danger in 2024 with Act 191. The law restricted deceptive AI media in the run-up to elections. A federal judge struck it down this January on First Amendment grounds. The lead plaintiff was the Babylon Bee — a satire site the statute could not tell apart from a disinformation campaign.
The ruling exposed something lawmakers had not quite reckoned with. A law against deepfakes binds the law-abiding, who were not the problem. It does nothing to a hostile foreign actor already past caring what Hawaiʻi makes illegal.
But there is a deeper trouble underneath the legal one, and Khowaja is its small, almost comic example. A man can claim to be the state’s CTO and get booked to speak for the same reason a deepfake can swing an election.
Checking Khowaja would have taken a minute. A Google search for his name returns nothing tying him to state government. A search for the state’s technology lead returns Christine Maii Sakuda, the Chief Information Officer. Or they could have asked an AI chatbot — the sort of tool Khowaja was on stage to discuss. The answer would have come back in thirty seconds.
More information comes at us than we can weigh. So we stop weighing and start pattern matching. A headline confirms our bias, and we don’t even click through to read. A video looks like the man, and we believe it. The technology is the occasion. Our vulnerability to deception is ancient, and no law can protect us.
Scripture treats false witness as a major sin. The ninth commandment holds a people together when the lawyers sleep. When neighbors know each other across years, a stranger with a borrowed title gets one polite question and the con ends. After a few bad deals, the snake oil salesman gets run out of town. These days, the conman gets a microphone.
The remedy is neither sexy nor scalable. It is the slow work of building trust in small, local institutions. Trust builds in congregations, neighborhoods, and civic bodies modest enough that the same faces show up to the same meetings. Trust is earned in steps, and lies are caught early because someone is always paying attention.
On the OpportunItaly stage at CES, Khowaja told his audience that artificial intelligence “is also about human connectivity. Humans want to connect. Humans want to interact.” He was right. He was also the last person on that stage with standing to say it.
Human connection is not a feature of technology; it is a function of trust, and trust is a function of truth. Without truth, human connection is just a con.
