Keith Raffel

As senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Keith Raffel worked to monitor the activities of the CIA, NSA and other three-letter agencies. Keith left the Intelligence Committee to return home to California and run for Congress. Although losing that race is still a painful memory, he counts himself lucky for escaping the morass of congressional politics when he did.

With an engineer father and hometown of Palo Alto, Keith then followed the path Fate had laid out and embarked on a tech career. He founded and then sold Silicon Valley’s first cloud-computing company. For the past eight years, he’s been a lecturer and resident scholar at Harvard. While there, he developed and co-taught a course on technology, ethics and society.

Keith writes a weekly column for Creators Syndicate that appears in newspapers and on websites across the country. In addition, he has established a career as a bestselling novelist. TheNew York Times deemed his first work of fiction, Dot Dead, “worthy of a Steve Jobs keynote presentation.” All told, he has five published novels: two Silicon Valley mysteries, an archeological thriller, a spy story and a historical thriller.

A long-time denizen of Palo Alto in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Keith now spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard where he lives in an apartment in the same 400-student dorm as he did when an undergraduate himself.