This method is intended to be a lightweight check of the number of existing issues and the maximum updated timestamp, but it can actually be quite expensive. From a NewRelic profile taken by an enterprise customer:

This doesn't really need to check permissions, because the nastiest thing that can happen is that we leak information that some issue would be on their agile board if only they could see it. It seems strange that a developer wouldn't have permission to see issues on their board in the first place, so filtering the count and last updated timestamp seems unnecessary, here.