Before President Obama left for his 17-day vacation in Hawaii, White House officials made it clear that his holiday reading would consist of a lot more than beach novels to escape the stresses of Washington. He'd also be studying a 300-page report on how to rein in the government's controversial surveillance programs that had just been delivered to him by a high-level panel of experts.

Sure, Obama has gotten in plenty of rounds of golf with his presidential posse, as well as impromptu trips to shaved ice joints and leisurely strolls along the islands' stunning beaches with his family. But weighing on him throughout the winter getaway has been one of the most consequential national security decisions of his presidency: whether to adopt a set of recommendations that would represent the most dramatic curbing of the intelligence community's eavesdropping powers since the Vietnam war.

This has been an especially rough year for Obama, with the government shutdown, brinksmanship over the debt ceiling, a domestic agenda that largely ground to a halt, and the famously troubled health-care rollout. But no issue has created more sustained pain for the administration than the torrent of leaks about the government's electronic spying programs by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden .

And none cuts more to the core of Obama's identity as a leader. How will he reconcile the tensions between protecting the American people from terrorism and preserving their fundamental rights to privacy and personal liberty? Will he be remembered as the liberal constitutionalist who restored American values to the war on terror or as a warrior-president who presided over and enhanced the surveillance state?