Despite leaking state secrets, Snowden's life was never threatened by US officials. Yes, he's a whistleblower, but his actions are far more serious than developing software. Even then, US officials talk of imprisonment at worst.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/11/ron-paul-us-gover...

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-spies-talk-about-killing-s...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/edward-snowden-...

Your second link cites Buzzfeed as a source, and the Buzzfeed article[1] claims some unnamed low-level officials would like to kill Snowden. Yet these anonymously-quoted people also admit that they wouldn't do it unless they had approval from higher up. Pretty close, but still not a threat.

Your last link is about a retired government official making a joke in very poor taste.

None of these are actual threats, let alone by US officials. They're either idle musings, or bad jokes, or "I want to, but I'm not going to." I certainly don't agree with the people making these despicable statements, but they're qualitatively different from, "If you don't stop leaking state secrets, you will die."

1. http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-spies-want-edw...

My sister's home town in Michigan says it's illegal to spit on the ground. America threatens jail time for possessing weed!

You mean kind like you're free to go wherever you want in prison, as long as you don't try to walk out of the door of your cell? :P

Here's a really sobering thought though:

> You can have a lot of political 'change' in the United States, but will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone’s bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts? And contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really.

> So I say that free speech in many Western places is free not as a result of liberal circumstances but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn’t matter what you say. The dominant elite doesn’t have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not; it is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not. But China is still a political society, although it is rapidly heading toward a fiscalized society. And other societies, like Egypt, are still heavily politicized. Their rulers really do need to be concerned about what people think, so they expend proportionate efforts on controlling freedom of speech.

-- Julian Assange