Now, after successfully badgering Congress into reauthorizing the program — with new safeguards the president says will protect privacy — he has left little question that he owns it.
The new surveillance program created by the USA Freedom Act will end more than a decade of bulk collection of telephone records by the National Security Agency. But it will require telephone companies to hold the records and make them available for broad searches by government officials with a court order.
That compromise may end up being too restrictive for the counterterrorism professionals, as some Republicans predict. Or, as others vehemently insisted in congressional debate during the past week, it may remain too much of an intrusion on the lives of innocent Americans.
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Either way, Mr. Obama’s signature on the law late Tuesday night ensures that he delivers the next president a method of hunting for terrorism threats despite the privacy concerns that spread throughout the American public after Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, revealed the existence of the telephone program.
White House officials said Mr. Obama was comfortable that history would show that he struck the right balance.
“To the extent that we’re talking about the president’s legacy, I would suspect that that would be a logical conclusion from some historians,” said Josh Earnest, the president’s press secretary. Mr. Earnest said the compromise that the president pushed found a way to address the anxiety that bulk collection of telephone records violated Americans’ civil liberties.
But he added that the president was pleased that the government would still have a way to access those records.
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“This is the kind of rigorous oversight and, essentially, a rules architecture that the president does believe is important,” Mr. Earnest said. “And that is materially different than the program that he inherited.”

Mr. Obama’s efforts to find that balance put him at the center of a fierce debate over the surveillance program, which officially expired early Monday morning before lawmakers approved changes on Tuesday.
In the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, railed against the president’s compromise proposal, saying that “we shouldn’t be disarming unilaterally as our enemies grow more sophisticated and aggressive.”
At the same time, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, excoriated Mr. Obama, saying that “the president continues to conduct an illegal program,” a reference to a recent ruling by a federal appeals court that the original N.S.A. telephone data collection program was not authorized by federal law.
What emerged from that debate was a rare, bipartisan victory in Congress for the president, whose compromise was embraced by Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate. Even some of the president’s most ardent critics in the Republican Party endorsed the approach.
“This is a good day for the American people whose rights will be protected,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, told CNN last week — an almost unheard-of example of the Tea Party lawmaker agreeing with Mr. Obama.
The compromise on the telephone collection program is part of a broader tug-and-pull for Mr. Obama, who inherited a vast national security infrastructure from President George W. Bush.
As a candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama was harshly critical of some of that infrastructure, pledging at the time to review every executive order by Mr. Bush “to determine which of those have undermined civil liberties, which are unconstitutional, and I will reverse them with the stroke of a pen.”
Once in office, Mr. Obama did roll back some of Mr. Bush’s decisions — in one of his first acts as president, Mr. Obama signed an executive order banning torture.
But his national security team has also embraced some of Mr. Bush’s methods, arguing that they are necessary to protect Americans against attacks and to fight threats abroad.
In 2013, after Mr. Snowden revealed the existence of the telephone program, Mr. Obama explained how his thinking had evolved.
“I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs,” Mr. Obama said. “My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. And the modest encroachments on the privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net, it was worth us doing.”
With the passage of the USA Freedom Act nearly two years later, Mr. Obama has accepted the end of the most controversial part of those programs, while finding a way to maintain the government’s ability to search the records.
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