Well, I suppose I can try.

While I understand that Github is a private body and that their site is, well, their site ... forcibly deleting someone's gist simply because they don't like that that someone has found a way around their invite process smacks of underhandedness.

Will they suspend his account permanently as a result of this leak? Will he have his account limited in some other way, preventing him from having private repos, for example? Will they lash out against anyone sharing Atom.zip that they can trace back to a github account?

It's just all very "our show, our rules" of them to delete the gist.

And yes, I understand that it is their show. And yes, their ruleset too.

Doesn't make me feel any comfier in the knowledge that they'll simply delete anything that they don't approve of.

Imagine someone posting the url to access your commercial product because your dev didn't secure the download. And you have control over the post. What would you do then? And Github can delete anything they want. If anyone has problem with that, they sure can sue Github.

Like I said - I get that.

Also, like I said - it seems underhanded that they just reach into an account and delete gists

If it is the case that they removed it, I would prefer "Github has removed this content" to "Oh, hey, we can't find that".

Well, is there any sort of content that you would not fault them for removing?