Though a U.S. District Court ruled the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program was unconstitutional on August 17, 2006, “on January 10, 2007, they [the Justice Department] got one of the eleven [rotating] judges on the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court…to interpret as permissible a key aspect of the warrantless program. This involved working with a friendly judge to come up with an ‘innovative’ way to interpret the FISA statute so that the agency could target foreign-to-foreign communications that simply transit a U.S. switch–and the interception is done on U.S. soil–without going to the court for every name.” The judge officially issued this order on January 17, 2007.
– James Bamford, The Shadow Factory, Page 291