David Burnham, United States, is an award-winning investigative reporter and the co-founder and co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which provides data on federal investigative and regulatory agencies.
Burnham was a reporter with The New York Times from 1968 to 1986 and has investigated government enforcement agencies, ranging from the New York Police Department to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service. His New York Times series on police corruption in the early 1970s inspired the movie Serpico.
Burnham’s books include Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice (1996), A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS (1990) and The Rise of the Computer State (1984).
Burnham received a George Polk Award for Community Service in 1968; an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship in 1987; the Investigative Reporters and Editors Best Investigative Book award in 1990, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Bellagio, Italy, in 1992.