No Password Required: Nonresident Senior Fellow at AEI and the Person Who Explained the Internet to Capitol Hill

Shane Tews is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on cybersecurity, privacy, artificial intelligence, and internet governance. She is also president of Logan Circle Strategies, a strategic advisory firm working at the intersection of technology and policy. Before her think tank work, Shane helped introduce modems to the George H.W. Bush White House, walked the halls of Capitol Hill explaining the internet to blank-staring legislators, and spent years at Verisign helping shape the foundational frameworks of how the internet would be governed.

In this episode, Shane traces her unlikely path from the Bush administration to becoming one of Washington's most trusted voices on tech policy. She breaks down why regulating outcomes rather than inputs is the only sensible approach to technology governance, why the United States and European Union are operating from fundamentally different innovation philosophies, and why a national privacy bill is long overdue. She also explains why most organizations and individuals are far less protected than they think and why nobody knows who to call when something goes wrong.

Jack Clabby and co-host Kayley Melton talk with Shane about legacy system vulnerabilities, the cybersecurity implications of agentic AI, and what policymakers absolutely must get right over the next decade. She also reflects on what the CISA reauthorization limbo means for companies that don't even know they've lost liability protection.

In the lifestyle polygraph segment, Shane reveals she has 20,000 emails across eight accounts, admits she fakes laughs at bad jokes out of Midwestern politeness, shares her obsession with “The Bear” and “Peaky Blinders,” and tells us about her children's book project using Google Omni called "Shane on a Train."