In his final press conference of the year, President Barack Obama told reporters on Friday that despite the fact that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures have accelerated the national debate about national security and civil liberties, he has caused “unnecessary damage.”

“I think that as important and as necessary as this debate has been, it is also important to understand that it has done unnecessary damage to United States' intelligence capabilities and to US diplomacy,” he said. “But I will leave it up to the courts and the attorney general to weigh in publicly on the specifics of Mr. Snowden’s case.”

Obama was responding specifically to comments from last week by the NSA’s incoming number two official, Rick Ledgett, who said that “it’s worth having a conversation about” possible amnesty for Snowden, the former NSA contractor. (At least one tech leader has recommended to Obama that he grant Snowden a full pardon.)

“There's a difference between Ledgett saying something and the president of the United States saying something,” Obama added.

By contrast, a former CIA director had a much harsher suggestion for Snowden.

"I think giving him amnesty is idiotic,” said James Woolsey, who ran the CIA from 1993 to 1995, in an interview this week on Fox News. “He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead."

“Just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we necessarily should.”

The president said that he would spend his Christmas holiday in Hawaii reviewing the report issued this week by the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which issued dozens of recommendations.

“The fact of the matter is that the US, for all our warts, is a country that abides by rule of law that cares deeply about privacy, that cares about civil liberties, and cares about the constitution,” he added. “We have countries that do these things that Snowden says he's worried about, engaging in surveillance of our own citizens, targeting citizens, targeting members of the press who are able to sit on the sidelines and argue that it's the US that has problems when it comes to surveillance.”

Obama also specifically talked about the Patriot Act’s Section 215 program, which compels telecom firms to hand over bulk metadata to the NSA.

“In all the reviews of this program that have been done, there have not been incidents in ways that the NSA acted inappropriately in the use of this data, but what is also clear from the public debate is that people are concerned with the prospect of abuse,” he said, “and think that’s what the judge in the district court suggested. And although his opinion obviously differs from rulings on the FISA Court, we’re taking those into account.”

However, President Obama’s assertion is directly contradicted by the “LOVEINT” disclosures, when NSA agents knowingly used the spy infrastructure to monitor romantic partners and their exes. Further, newly declassified documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court show that judges have routinely been appalled at the NSA’s behavior and track record.

“The question we’re going to have to ask is: ‘Can we accomplish the same goals that this program is intended to accomplish in ways that give the public more confidence that the NSA is doing what it’s supposed to be doing?’ I have confidence in the fact that the NSA is not engaging in domestic surveillance or snooping around,” Obama concluded.

“But I also recognize that as technologies change and people can start running algorithms and programs that map out all the information that we’re downloading on a daily basis into our telephones and our computers, that we may have to refine this further to give people more confidence, and I’m going to be working very hard on doing that.”

“And we have to provide more confidence to the international community. In some ways, what has been challenging is the fact that we do have a lot of laws and checks and balances and safeguards and audits when it comes to the NSA, and other intelligence agencies are not spying on Americans. We’ve had less legal constraint in terms of what we’re doing internationally. But I think part of what’s been interesting about this whole exercise is recognizing that in a virtual world, some of these boundaries don’t matter anymore. And just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we necessarily should. And the values that we’ve got as Americans are ones that we have to be willing to apply beyond our borders and perhaps more systematically than we’ve done in the past.”