In the past, Germany has pushed for an agreement similar to the understanding that the United States has with Britain and three other English-speaking allies that prohibits spying on one another.

Until now the Obama administration has been loath to broker such a deal with the Germans, who have publicly stated their interest in a nonspying pact, partly because other nations would demand a similar arrangement. But the revelations of recent days have so strained relations between Washington and Berlin that that calculus appears to be changing — especially because American officials have difficulty making a credible case for what the United States has to gain from spying on senior German officials.

In the past, there have been questions about what the United States might gain from entering into a no-spying pact with the Germans. Several years ago, Dennis C. Blair, then the director of national intelligence, held discussions with French officials about such an agreement between the United States and France partly because he thought such a pact could yield practical benefits: it would allow the F.B.I. and other counterintelligence organizations to shift the few resources used in trying to hunt down French spies inside the United States to more productive assignments.

Mr. Blair made the proposal despite the fact that the French are believed to have had an active program of industrial espionage inside the United States, working vigorously to steal American technological secrets. And current and former American intelligence officials said that the Germans are far less aggressive inside the United States than the French.

Administration officials say the National Security Agency, in its push to build a global data-gathering network that can reach into any country, has rarely weighed the long-term political costs of some of its operations. Whether to make those kinds of reciprocal agreements with allies is among the questions two different administration reviews of N.S.A. spying practices hope to address.

One is being run inside the National Security Council. Another is under way by five members of an outside review panel created by Mr. Obama after the disclosures by Mr. Snowden.

Among its members are Richard A. Clarke, who served in the Clinton and both Bush administrations and has become an expert on cyberconflict; Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A.; and Cass Sunstein, who ran the office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama White House before returning to Harvard Law School.