WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s orders to change some U.S. surveillance practices put the burden on Congress to deal with a national security controversy that has alarmed Americans and outraged foreign allies. Yet he avoided major action on the practice of sweeping up billions of phone, e-mail and text messages from across the globe.

In a speech Friday at the Justice Department, Obama said he was placing new limits on how intelligence officials access phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans and was moving toward eventually stripping the massive data collection from the government’s hands.

His promises to end government storage of its collection of data on Americans’ telephone calls — and require judicial review to examine the data — were met with skepticism from privacy advocates and some lawmakers.

Privacy advocates called Obama’s proposal a shell game — by assigning the collection to a new, as-of-yet undecided entity instead of ending it outright.

Obama said he has been torn between how to protect privacy rights and protect the U.S. from terror attacks.

“The challenge is getting the details right, and that is not simple,” he said.

His speech had been anticipated since former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden made off with an estimated 1.7 million documents related to surveillance and other NSA operations and gave them to several journalists around the world last year. The revelations in the documents spurred debate about whether Americans wanted to give up some privacy in exchange for intelligence-gathering on terror suspects.

Obama acknowledged more needs to be done, but he largely left it to Congress to work out the details.

The NSA says it does not listen in on the phone calls or read the Internet messages without specific court orders on a case-by-case basis. But intelligence officials do collect specific information about the calls and messages, such as how long they lasted, to try to track communications of suspected terrorists.