It's been more than six months since The Guardian and The Washington Post started reporting on top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
And even after all these months and countless revelations coming out of that treasure trove of NSA secrets, reportedly exfiltrated with a USB drive, nobody seems to know how many documents Snowden actually got his hands on.
See also: NSA Can 'Easily' Break Cellphone Encryption, Report Says
The latest figure to surface? 1.7 million documents, according to sources of CBS's 60 Minutes reporter John Miller.
Miller, who didn't reveal his source, mentioned the number during Sunday's episode of 60 Minutes, and he asked Rick Ledgett, the NSA official in charge of the task force investigating the Snowden leaks, if that was accurate.
"I wouldn't dispute that," answered Ledgett.
Yet, One day earlier, anonymous U.S. government officials told The New York Times that the investigators have been hitting a wall, and they don't know how much Snowden took because the NSA Hawaii facility where Snowden worked didn't have any software to monitor what the employees are doing with their computers.
"They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took," a senior administration official told The Times. "I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy."
In the past, all kinds of numbers have been thrown out.
In October, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander said Snowden shared between 50,000 and 200,000 documents with reporters, but that's just the documents he leaked to the press, not all the ones he took.
Whatever the number, the NSA is worried that the worst is yet to come.
Ledgett said Snowden has 31,000 very sensitive documents that he defined as "the keys to the kingdom."
Unfortunately, the 60 Minutes segment, which was lambasted for being one sided, also lacked details and a good explanation of what these 31,000 potentially damaging documents could be.
Ledgett said those 31,000 documents "would give [enemies] a roadmap of what we know, what we don't know, and give them — implicitly, a way to — protect their information from the U.S. intelligence community's view."
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images