LONDON — Patrick Rock, a close aide to British PM David Cameron who helped author recent U.K. government policy instituting Internet porn filters, was arrested in connection to child abuse images.
Rock, 62, was arrested by detectives from the National Crime Agency over a potential offense relating to child porn after they examined computer systems used by the suspect.
Rock, the deputy head of Downing Street’s Number 10’s policy unit, resigned from his position after questioning. He had worked as an advisor to the Conservative party for 30 years and became acquainted with Cameron in the mid-1990s.
"This is an ongoing investigation so it would not be appropriate to comment further, but the Prime Minister believes that child abuse imagery is abhorrent and that anyone involved with it should be properly dealt with under the law,” a Downing Street spokesperson said after the arrest.
The news harkens back to last year’s revelation that U.K. Members of Parliament had used government computers to access adult sites more than 300,000 times in 2012.
Last summer Cameron announced an opt-in system under which households are now denied sexually explicit online material unless they specifically ask for such access. All major ISPs complied with the directive, which is now the source of an ongoing debate in the U.K.