I believe they rotate who has the duty.
...and that article suggests that (if we accept they rotate duty and meet monthly say) they spend, on average, (8 hours / 133 * 60 minutes) ~3.5 minutes carefully evaluating each application. If not, it's ~30 seconds per application.
So are the numbers wrong? Or is the bold assertion that they 'carefully review each application' completely farcical?
30 seconds to rubber stamp an application sounds about right to me.
The point remains; there is no 'fulltime' FISA court.
Periodically the presiding judges get together and process a bulk of applications all at once.
The FISC has its own website which happens to answer your question right on the "About" page[1]:
The Court sits in Washington D.C., and is composed of eleven federal district court judges who are designated by the Chief Justice of the United States. Each judge serves for a maximum of seven years and their terms are staggered to ensure continuity on the Court. By statute, the judges must be drawn from at least seven of the United States judicial circuits, and three of the judges must reside within 20 miles of the District of Columbia. Judges typically sit for one week at a time, on a rotating basis.
> ...and that article suggests that (if we accept they rotate duty and meet monthly say) they spend, on average, (8 hours / 133 * 60 minutes) ~3.5 minutes carefully evaluating each application. If not, it's ~30 seconds per application.
No, the article says 33 per week. The judges aren't meeting together every few months; the sitting judge is replaced by the next every week or so. Assuming an 8 hour work day and 33 warrants per week, that (8 * 5) / 33 = 1.2 hours per warrant on average.
[1] http://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/about-foreign-intelligence-surv...
And their jobs are not really to weigh the merits, but to cover the judge's ass, just in case something really egregious comes back that points at their bench.
As they preside over a secret court that determines whether the low standard of reasonable suspicion has been passed, the judges barely need to spend any time at all actually judging anything. The worst that can happen is that the trial judge might exclude the evidence collected on their warrant, and that's about as damaging to their careers as an ingrown hair.
I'm not sure you could find a cushier job if you designed one from scratch.