Duncan Campbell
This article is about the investigative journalist born in 1952. For the Guardian crime correspondent of the same name, born 1944, see Duncan Campbell (crime correspondent).
Duncan Campbell FRSA (born 1952) is a British investigative journalist, author and television producer. Since 1975 he has specialised in intelligence and security, defence, policing and civil liberties, and latterly in computer forensics. He came out as gay in 1987 and has investigated a number of LGBT subjects, notably bogus HIV and AIDS treatments and the practitioners who sold them.[1]
Early life
Campbell was born in Glasgow and brought up and educated in Dundee. His mother was a mathematician who had worked at Bletchley Park under Alan Turing. He first trained in computer programming at sixteen, took an open scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, and graduated in 1973 with a first in physics, followed by a master's degree in operational research at the University of Sussex.
At Sussex he joined the collective that produced Brighton Voice, a paper of broadly anarcho-socialist outlook whose coverage included gay rights, civil liberties, policing and housing.
Investigative journalism
In 1976 Campbell wrote "The Eavesdroppers" for Time Out with Mark Hosenball, the first occasion on which the British press printed the name of GCHQ. Hosenball, an American, was deported; Campbell, who could not be, was placed under surveillance by MI5 and his telephones tapped.
The following year he was arrested with Crispin Aubrey and John Berry under the Official Secrets Act, in what became known as the ABC trial. He was convicted in 1978 but no punishment was imposed.
He was a staff writer at the New Statesman from 1978 to 1991 and its associate editor for investigations from 1988. In 1985 he was commissioned by BBC Scotland to make the documentary series Secret Society. Its Zircon episode, concerning a secret satellite programme, provoked the affair of that name in 1987: Campbell's front door was kicked in and his home searched, and Special Branch raided BBC Scotland to seize the tapes. In 1988 he revealed the existence of the ECHELON surveillance system.
In 2005 and 2007 he investigated the Operation Ore prosecutions, showing that computer evidence used against more than seven thousand people had rested on falsehoods.
LGBT journalism
Campbell came out publicly in 1987 and has since written extensively on lesbian and gay subjects. Among his best-known work in this field are investigations into bogus HIV and AIDS medicines and the practitioners who promoted them, during a period when treatments of unproven or no value were being sold to men with a terminal diagnosis.[1]
He also wrote the account of the founding of Stonewall which records the part played by Douglas Slater, the House of Lords clerk who briefed the anti-Section 28 campaigners on parliamentary procedure at Ian McKellen's house in Limehouse in February 1988.[2]
Campbell v the Pink Paper
In 1992 Campbell won libel damages of £20,000 from the Pink Paper over an article which accused him of conducting a vendetta against the AIDS organisation Positively Healthy, of using threats to obtain his story, and of taking money from pharmaceutical companies. The claims were found to be defamatory. Campbell said that he had himself been threatened and physically attacked after the article appeared.[3]
The case is cited in subsequent scholarship as marking a sharp division within the gay community of the period, between investigative scrutiny of unproven AIDS treatments and a more oppositional stance towards orthodox medicine.[4]
Awards
- 1980 – Cobden Trust Award
- 1983 – Periodical Publishers Association, Specialist Writer of the Year
- 1987 – What the Papers Say, Investigative Journalist of the Year
- 1987 – Campaign for Freedom of Information, Media Award
- 1989 – Magazine Publishing Awards, Best Business Feature
Selected books
- Big Brother is Listening: Phone Tappers and the Security State (1981)
- War Plan UK: The Truth about Civil Defence in Britain (1982)
- The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier: American Military Power in Britain (1984)
- On the Record: Surveillance, Computers and Privacy, with S. Connor (1986)
External links
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lesbian & gay rights, DuncanCampbell.org.
- ↑ Founding Stonewall, DuncanCampbell.org.
- ↑ "Index Index: United Kingdom", Index on Censorship, 1992.
- ↑ Academic paper accessed via CORE Open Access Research.