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NSA: Less need now for Snowden deal

A top National Security Agency offficial says there's less need now for the U.S. Government to cut a deal with leaker Edward Snowden than there was after his wave of surveillance disclosures began more than a year ago.

"As time goes on, the utility for us of having that conversation becomes less," NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett said during an appearance Saturday at the Aspen Security Forum. "It's been over a year since he had access to our networks and our information so the need for us to understand that greater level of detail is lesser and lesser."

Ledgett was the first U.S. official to public discuss the possibility of amnesty or leniency for Snowden, telling "60 Minutes" in an interview aired last December that it was "worth having conversations about" such a deal if it could stem the tide of leaks. The discussion Saturday was framed slightly differently, focusing on obtaining a better idea of what Snowden copied from NSA systems and reportedly gave to journalists.

Ledgett's remarks signal that lawyers for Snowden might have a weaker bargaining position over time. However, the NSA official also suggested that the damage Snowden did to NSA operations will also diminish with time because terrorist groups and foreign militaries change their communication methods from time to time anyway.

"So, as time goes on, his information becomes less useful," said Ledgett, who was recently promoted after handling the NSA's response to the Snowden revelations.

The NSA official acknowledged that the impact of Snowden's leaks on the spy agency's ability to gather information was hard to measure, but he insisted it was serious.

"When people say there are no damages with the disclosures, they are categorically wrong,” he said. “Our hope is that they’re not catastrophically wrong.....In some of these cases, our ability [to gather information] is a fingernail's breadth."

Still, Ledgett, said NSA is bringing in a lot of data and will continue to do so.

"It's not the end of the world. It's not the end of the SIGINT system," he said, using military lingo for NSA's main task, "signals intelligence."