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Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) presidential campaign wants to be known as the “the only one with a tech advisory board, a CTO, a digital strategist, and offices in both San Francisco and Austin, Texas,” reports Ellen Cushing for Buzzfeed, who didn’t manage to get the candidate to answer any questions at a tech event he did in San Francisco this past Saturday.

Paul had to pay $100,000 to get RandPaul.com, CNN’s Jeremy Diamond reported last week.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) got his BernieSanders.com for free from a supporter, Paul Joffe, who had paid $2,500 to grab it back in 2014—all Joffe wanted in return was to meet the Senator, CNN’s Dan Merica reports.

HillaryClinton.net redirects to Carly Fiorina’s website, McKay Coppins reports for BuzzFeed.

With billionaire-funded presidential Super Pacs becoming the norm for most of the 2016 field, Peter Beinart writes in the Atlantic that journalists should step up their scrutiny:

Mega-donors should face a version of the same tradeoff politicians face. Presidential candidates know that in exchange for pursuing immense political power, they must forfeit much of their privacy. Mega-donors, who are also seeking immense political power via their donations, should have to make the same trade. Journalists should not only investigate their interactions with politicians, they should ferret out information about what they believe and how they conduct their affairs.

A Reddit April Fool’s Joke called “The Button” has attracted close to a million users, and as Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell West of the Brookings Institution’s TechTank argue, its “wild success…holds interesting lessons for how to develop public policies in the internet age.” They go on to argue that open data and symbolic rewards can motivate internet users to do amazing things, but in my humble opinion they miss one big fact about The Button that won’t necessarily be transferrable to any current government entity seeking to tap into the power of crowds: it’s on Reddit!

In Wired, Sam Gregory of Witness describes some innovative ideas for making the current wave of live-streamed protests into a political form that could radically empower activists on the ground with thousands of “distant witnesses” prepared to take action in their support?

Natasha Singer and Mike Isaac of The New York Times report on SherpaShare, a free analytics tool that helps drivers for services like Uber and Lyft get a real handle on their actual earnings (which are typically much less than what the companies claim) and better optimize their driving patterns.

This is civic tech: Grad student Chris Henrick explains in Urban Omnibus how two apps he developed using open government data from New York City—Am I Rent Stabilized? and the North West Bushwick Community Map—work as “prompts for civic action,” particularly on behalf of tenant rights. (h/t BetaNYC)