it's a public repo
Public GitHub repos are viewable by anyone with or without an account. You can view and clone the repo if you know the correct URL.
Private GitHub repos are only accessible to those given access.
Within the scope of this terminology, my understanding is that this repo is private. I think I'm right based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682657 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682501. Am I right?
Within the scope of corporate security, I understand that the code is being moved out of the local intranet onto a non-corporate-managed Web service. However, GitHub manage private repos for some fairly high-level groups (or at least I assume they do), so their data protection policies are clearly very decent. (I at least know that individual floors on the building are keycarded, which is nice. I learned this from a story posted here by a guy who got fired.) So, even though this is an impressive level of stupid, I'm relieved that no leaking can/will happen (particularly for your sake now you've posted this here).
OP, please note that several people have reached out to you from top-level comments. If you could add a new comment listing an email address (IANAL but a new gmail one would probably be okay), or even better yet put it in your profile, that would probably result in some nice leads for you.
Spot on and this is what I meant. By "public github" I meant code on the internet but accessible to anyone in the consulting company. There are multiple modules and they are moved to github,bitbucket and stash.
This also means people without background checks or ANYONE in the organization has access to ALL the code of the bank. In the bank ONLY people in specific departments have access to specific code (As is customary for all IT industry)
I am not trying to be a whistle-blower and mr goody two shoes. I am very angry that my refusal to upload code to the internet is resulting in non-payment of fees and threats that I will never get a contract in this city. And as an independent contractor I am truly terrified of uploading bank code to the internet; I don't want to end up in jail for stupid reasons.
Hmm, so this is violating standard access controls. I can appreciate your freaked-out-ness...
I understand you're not trying to make a scene (especially considering the circumstances!) and are simply trying to resolve what is effectively a legally-tangled paycheck bug.
Have you made any practical headway with figuring out how to resolve this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682560 looks interesting, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682806 sounds helpful also.
PS. FWIW, I'm in Sydney myself :) although I'm not working at the moment.