keith raffel (born 1951) is an american novelist, technology executive, university lecturer, and former united states senate aide and political candidate. he is the author of five novels: "dot dead" (2006), "smasher" (2009), "drop by drop: a thriller" (2011), "a fine and dangerous season" (2012), and "temple mount" (2014). after graduating from harvard law school, raffel served as counsel to the united states senate select committee on intelligence during the late 1970s and early 1980s. he returned to his home state of california in 1982, where he unsuccessfully ran for united states congress. raffel then embarked on business career in the technology sector. in 1996, he founded upshot corporation, a customer relationship management (crm) software company that was a pioneer in cloud computing and was later acquired by siebel systems. from 2011 to 2013 raffel served as senior vice president and chief commercial officer at complete genomics, a life sciences company that specializes in human genome sequencing and analysis. he is currently a resident scholar and lecturer at harvard university.