Pure speculation, but is it possible that Lynch used the Darktrace software which is used by the British government to secure government systems to introduce a backdoor into those systems and then sold the gathered information to the highest bidder? If so, the first thing that MI6 would have noticed was that money which ultimately came from China was landing in Lynch's accounts and the second thing they would have noticed was that China was successfully obtaining proprietary governmental and corporate data (and exclusively from those systems protected by Darktrace, which is not all of them.)
If this is the case, I could understand why they hated these people this badly. The use of torture implies that they wanted information concerning the nature of the backdoor. Bin Laden was tortured for his Truecrypt keys shortly after his capture on 1 May 2011 and was similarly dumped overboard. Another thing which is not clear is whether they were able to get the information they wanted as he might not have known the specific information they needed to remove the backdoor. Without that information, it seems likely they're going to have to dump the Darktrace software entirely, which would require both time and expense. When the Brits are getting compromised by their own businessmen and therefore by China by extension and their solution upon discovering this is to torture someone on their yacht and then sink the yacht, that tells me that the Brits have fallen from their former position of glory in a big way. The guy who ran Lynch's finances wound up dead, which might have been part of an effort to prevent some other individual from picking up the espionage activity where Chamberlain left off. Chamberlain would have had exclusive knowledge of the precise financial arrangements and I suppose they feared he would pass this on to someone else. He also would have been responsible for collecting the sensitive data and sending it to the Chinese contacts. Perhaps the Brits have reasoned that even if there is a backdoor in the system, if only Lynch and Chamberlain had access to it and both are dead, the existence of the backdoor is of no relevance going forward. Isn't that insane? They're going to just keep using the compromised software on the basis of an assumption that only two people within the company had access to the backdoor! If the Chinese have the level of capability I believe they do; the sort of capability I described to you earlier today concerning Bluetooth hacks; they would have discovered the login information used by Lynch and Chamberlain long ago. This is insane.
China's modus operandi in any case in which someone is selling them a coveted product is to find out where that person is obtaining that product so that they can cut out the middle man. The very first thing they probably did was crawl the drives of Lynch and Chamberlain after this business relationship was established between China and Lynch. I mean, this is truly extraordinary. They're actually planning on continuing to use this software. If correct, it would mean that China will have omniscience in any British computer system running Darktrace in perpetuity.
