Telephone numbers

The story about *bush and the data mining of millions of American's telephone numbers is really all about presidential powers. We already know that all of the numbers can be turned into names in a short time; heck, go to Google and you can find out who belongs to which number. But what isn't being answered here is why didn't the president ask the FISA court before asking the telco's for the numbers? That's all he had to do...and it could have been done in secret; legally. He didn't ask because he doesn't think he has to ask anyone once he "Decides" what he's going to do. And the fact that a billion or so telephone numbers will provide so many false positives that the investigators will be bogged down for years...doesn't even occur to the nitwits that think this stuff up.