Right now, on Stack Overflow, Luigi Magione’s account has been renamed. Despite having fruitfully contributed to the network he is stripped of his name and his account is now known as “user4616250”.
This appears to violate the creative commons license under which Stack Overflow content is posted.
When the author asked about this:
As of yet, Stack Exchange has not replied to the above post, but they did promptly and within hours gave me a year-long ban for merely raising the question. Of course, they did draft a letter which credited the action to other events that occurred weeks before where I merely upvoted contributions from Luigi and bountied a few of his questions.
Didn't he confess though? That's quite a bit different than a pending trial.
The presumption or admission of guilt does not and should not justify violating the Creative Commons License, nor perpetrating any illegal behavior agains any individual(s).
If JK Rowling went out and robbed a bank, or murdered an ex-Husband, in no world or timeline would that give a member of her publishing company the right to scratch out her name from any of her books and replace it with their own or someone else's.
Absolutely. Even a guilty verdict shouldn't justify violating the Creative Commons License. It should either be completely taken down/hidden, or left in-tact.
That's not at all what I'm saying though though, I'm saying that it's reasonable for the site to take action to hide the account. He's a public figure with an apparent confession, which is going to attract a lot of attention to that account that otherwise wouldn't be there. They shouldn't have done it this way since it violates the Creative Commons License, but I am saying that action to hide/disable the account is warranted.
So far, all I've found is a 2018 publication by the Police Executive Research Forum, entitled "The Changing Nature of Crime And Criminal Investigations". It's a 67 page document, and I'm curious to see if it discusses how their investigation tactics may have changed, and if so, whether the aforementioned tactic is mentioned as being included.