After the Trump administration ended the “about” collection in March and came back to the court, Judge Collyer authorized the revised program. She also lifted the ban on searching for Americans’ information in upstream messages collected in the future, eliminating the complexity that had led to the analysts’ compliance problem.

The program’s contraction was a major change. It ended a form of surveillance that traced back to the George W. Bush administration’s secret post-Sept. 11 wiretapping program, Stellarwind. Since the existence of the “about” collection came to light in 2013, civil liberties advocates have criticized it as skirting or overstepping Fourth Amendment privacy boundaries.

The disclosure of Judge Collyer’s ruling also shed further light on several other important topics.

Among them, it showed that the court for the first time had extended access to raw, or unprocessed, information gathered under Section 702 to the National Counterterrorism Center, a clearinghouse of terrorism threat information.

The New York Times reported in 2013, based on documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, that the center had gained access to “raw FISA information” in early 2012. The ruling made clear that the 2012 expansion had been to certain types of raw surveillance governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but the center only recently gained access to raw messages from its Section 702 program.

In addition, Judge Collyer’s ruling provided further details about a disclosure last week that on one occasion in 2016, an F.B.I. agent working on an ordinary criminal case — as opposed to a national security matter — had conducted a search within a repository of raw emails gathered by the program and pulled up something to read.

The ruling explained that the F.B.I. had come across an email from a person on American soil who discussed abusing a child. An analyst, following up on that potential crime, had searched the repository to see if there were any more. These queries brought up the same email, but no additional ones.

The N.S.A. has had recurring problems with the transition of its warrantless surveillance systems from Stellarwind, which operated without external oversight and legal rules, to activities subject to the court’s supervision. In 2009 and 2011, the court similarly rebuked the government for misleading it about how its programs were operating.