It's really not that hard for the cops to track down someone in China. Besides, clowwindy didn't take any precautions before. I believe clowwindy once revealed the company he worked for.

Do you have a reference for clowwindy revealing his employer? I didn't see anything about that.

Cops can do a lot of things, but they don't pull information from thin air. Github would be one source of information.

It's odd that this entire, and very popular, discussion on HN doesn't delve into how this individual was found.

It's also interesting that your reply is from a new account with only this comment.

All ISPs in China are government-owned. It is believed that the government can locate any IP. Then it's only a problem of finding his IP by monitoring.

That may be possible, but no source had made that claim as far as I know, in this case or any other. Also, Github uses SSL. It would be interesting how they distinguish one user's Github connection from all the others originating in China.

Again, how the Github user was actually located by Chinese police was not disclosed or even discussed here. It's interesting that mentioning this has resulted in two comments by new accounts, solely to blame Chinese authorities as discovering the user on their own, with no evidence for it.