Not to mention the President has substantial executive order powers, that are often very hard to overrule. If the President went to bat for privacy, openly and regularly explained to the US public why, and used his executive order powers to implement changes - well, let the Congress try to overrule that. Obama can then issue 500 executive orders the next morning, slicing the issue into countless separate pieces, let Congress choke on trying to overrule it all, and if they want to stop him at that point, then they can impeach him - and at least Obama would stand on principle, and he'd be the only President impeached for doing the right thing.
Obama could stop all of this. He does not want to.
I agree that he probably doesn't want to. That Obama is somehow progressive was a fantasy people clung to because of the trauma of Bush, but Obama didn't even campaign on a progressive platform - at best he fit in the centre, but on many things he is right wing even by the standards of pre 9/11 US politics at least (by European standards he's still far right, as pretty much every US president, - many of his policies would be hard to defend even for most European conservative parties)
He just looked like a progressive choice against the backdrop of Bush and Cheney and McCain tied to the horror of possibly having Palin represent the lunatic fringe.
BUT, even if he did want to, if he tried to stand firm, everything else would grind to a halt. He'd burn all political capital he's got.
...he is right wing even by the standards of pre 9/11 US politics at least...
You are misremembering. Before 9/11, domestic spying and the warfare state was primarily part of the left wing platform. Bush was elected on a platform of "humble foreign policy" (as compared to Clinton/Gore's interventionism) and Republicans generally opposed domestic spying.
Only a few years before 9/11, it was paranoid gun toting right wing conspiracy theorists who defended crypto and turing machines, opposed the first patriot act (pushed by Biden and Clinton), and generally opposed the government.
(They dropped this opposition the minute Bush was elected, of course...)
Back in the 90's there was a movement in congress to lock down all computers iPhone style - i.e., ordinary users should not have access to Turing machines. The Clipper Chip was one of the early attempts at this.
The goal was to prevent piracy, encryption, child pornography, violent video games, and all the other bad things that the internet was enabling.
I too would sort of prefer that the President function as a benign dictator but Congress can exert much more fine-grained control over the Executive than the Executive can over legislative excess - Clinton actually got Congress to give him a line-item veto but the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional only 2 years later.
Exactly why I voted for him and now feel disappointed. I had the terribly stupid hope that he would bring about real change in his second term given he wouldn't have as much backlash to worry in regards to being reelected.
Obama could stop all of this. He does not want to.