Fourth Amendment Caucus defeats Patriot Act expansion in Congress

The NSA is looking at you

From a story by Caleb Chen on PIA:

Days ago, the Fourth Amendment Caucus, a collection of 25 House Representatives, managed to block an expansion of the Patriot Act surveillance measures in Congress. HR 5606, unironically called the “Anti-Terrorism Information Sharing Is Strength Act” failed to attain a ⅔ supermajority and pass the floor.

The caucus is composed of 12 Democrats and 13 Republicans. I was pleased to see that one of Oregon's representatives, Peter DeFazio, is a member of this caucus.

While 'information sharing' might be a good thing, the implementation of the Patriot Act is consuming an outsize share of our resources and is not delivering commensurate value. What the bureaucrats want is a large bureaucracy that can collect and file all the information in the world, and then use a magical algorithm to determine who the bad guys are and send men with guns to put a stop to their activities.
    The problem is that that is not the way the world works. Bureaucracies are good for implementing mindless activities, like the collection of data, but not so good for making any kind of intelligent decisions. Collecting data is all well and good, but we don't need to be devoting 10% of our Gross Domestic Product to it.

Fourth Amendment Caucus July 2106
Sorted by Region

Via Detroit Steve