Law enforcement personnel in Texas responding to school shootings are trained to “STOP THE KILLING” above all else, according to a 2020 active-shooter training course curriculum document posted on a Texas government website. The emphasis is theirs. 

The existence of this document and the specific training should raise additional questions about why Uvalde, Texas, police didn’t storm Robb Elementary School earlier this week. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the shooting. Police have been criticized for allowing the shooter to remain in the building for roughly 40 minutes and busying themselves with preventing parents from rushing in to save their children before U.S. Border Patrol agents eventually killed the shooter. 

The training was mandated in 2019 for all school-based law enforcement officers in Texas, a year after a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. According to the curriculum, this training was mandated in part because of how police responded to the Parkland shooting: “Citizens have a reasonable expectation that police officers are willing to take risks to reduce casualties during active shooter event,” it says. “Several officers have been criticized after events such as the shooting in Parkland, FL for a perceived failure to respond. Video footage of an officer ‘staging’ outside the building while the attack in Parkland was going on drew a great deal of public criticism.”

That is exactly what has happened in the aftermath of the Robb Elementary School shooting. Police held tasers and subdued parents who were begging them to storm the school in a staging area outside the building. The Texas training document states in no uncertain terms that school-based police officers should stop the shooter by any means necessary as a first priority, and that they should be prepared to put themselves in danger to do so: “Officer’s first priority is to move in and confront the attacker. This may include bypassing the injured and not responding to cries for help from children.”

This training course is mandatory for all school-based law enforcement officers. It's currently unclear what training local police officers who were not based at the school received, though Uvalde's SWAT team also trained for this exact scenario, according to a Facebook post by the force from 2020.

The document also makes clear that officers should not wait for backup, and should simply try to stop the shooter even if they would normally feel like it'd be prudent to wait for backup: “Time is the number one enemy during active shooter response. The short duration and high casualty rates produced by these events requires immediate response to reduce the loss of life,” it says. “In many cases that immediate response means a single (solo) officer response until such times as other forces can arrive. The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone.”

It also says that officers should expect to put themselves in harm’s way to protect students: “First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm’s way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.  First responders must understand and accept the role of ‘Protector’ and be prepared to meet violence with controlled aggression.”

If this isn’t clear enough, the document states, “As first responders, we must recognize that innocent life must be defended. A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”

The training document also states that a response to a hostage crisis should be different, and that “an event that starts as an active shooter event can easily morph into a hostage crisis” or “hostage/barricade situation.” At Robb Elementary School, the shooter seems to have barricaded himself into a single classroom, but nonetheless the training document is clear that officers should act quickly: “The number of deaths in an active shooter event is primarily affected by two factors:

• How quickly the police or other armed response arrives and engages them

• How quickly the shooter can find victims”

Nations and private companies around the world are continuing to take action against Russia amidst the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In the week since the attacks began, the Russian government and its wealthy oligarchs have been the target of international sanctions that have cut them off from financial institutions and other services. 

But one recent proposal has experts worried that some efforts to curtail Russia’s internet presence could be disastrous—both for everyday Russian citizens and the internet as a whole.

On Monday, the Ukrainian government sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the US-based nonprofit organization that manages the distribution of internet domain names. The letter, which is addressed to ICANN president and CEO Goran Marby, effectively demands that the organization suspend Russia from the internet’s domain registry system—specifically asking that it “permanently or temporarily” revoke top-level domains (TLDs) issued to the Russian Federation, including .ru, .рф, and .su.

Ukraine also asked ICANN to assist in revoking SSL security certificates issued for those domains, and to shut off Russia-based DNS root servers—the internet nodes responsible for routing requests to websites located within a given region. In other words, that would mean shutting out Russian internet users by removing their ability to resolve internet addresses from within Russia.

“All of these measures will help users seek for reliable information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda and disinformation,” wrote Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov, in the letter.

But internet infrastructure experts quickly shot down the idea, pointing out that while politically palatable, these moves would mostly affect average Russian citizens trying to access information outside of Russia—thus making the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts more effective. It also likely wouldn’t affect the Russian government or its military operations at all, they said, since its information warfare capabilities include being able to route around internet blockages and interruptions with relative ease.

Frederic Jennings, a cybersecurity lawyer based in Brooklyn, said that going forward with the proposal could set a lasting precedent while delivering little actual benefit in the long term.

“Asking ICANN to remove .ru TLDs or take action against Russian internet traffic is like asking Rand McNally to remove Russia from the map—perhaps ethically defensible, but practically absurd and counter-productive,” Jennings told Motherboard. “ICANN is in no position to affect the Russian state or its leadership, but its action could, and would, harm innocent Russian civilians for no reason other than their use of a .ru domain or their presence in Russia. Not only would it undermine ICANN's legitimacy as a standard-setting body, but it would bring further harm to those least responsible and least deserving of punishment.”

Others warned that the measures could have future negative effects on the politics around internet infrastructure. It could also make Russian internet users more susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks that target passwords and banking credentials, said Bill Woodcock, the executive director of the internet infrastructure organization Packet Clearing House.

“In the long-term, this would set the precedent that small industry associations in Los Angeles and Amsterdam would be playing arbiter in international conflicts, and messing with countries' supposedly-sovereign country-code top-level domains,” Woodcock wrote in a Twitter thread responding to Ukraine’s ICANN letter. “And if that were to happen, a lot more countries than just China and Russia would secede from the common-consensus-Internet that allows us to all talk to each other.”

Ukraine’s proposal is the latest attempt to limit Russia’s internet presence in response to the attacks. In the days following the invasion, many Russian OnlyFans users reported having their accounts briefly suspended—with the company later reporting that they had been reinstated. More recently, major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok announced that they will begin blocking sites controlled by the Russian government, including state-sanctioned media outlets RT and Sputnik. 

But attempts to go deeper by meddling with the internet’s core infrastructure have rightfully worried many experts, who emphasize the importance of net neutrality and see the compliance of standards groups like ICANN as unlikely. 

RIPE NCC, a regional internet organization in Europe with functions similar to ICANN, responded to Ukraine’s letter in a statement emphasizing the need for neutrality among internet operators.

“It is crucial that the RIPE NCC remains neutral and does not take positions with regard to domestic political disputes, international conflicts or war,” the organization wrote in a statement. “Failure to adhere to this approach would jeopardise the very model that has been key to the development of the Internet in our service region.”