When students went back to school last week at Permian High in Odessa, Texas, they wondered what had happened to the place over the summer. Gone was their old wide-open campus, now surrounded by a security fence with controlled entry points and clusters of surveillance cameras. Inside the school, they had to wear bar-coded photo-ID badges, and in many classrooms, "black boxes" with mirrored eyes stared implacably down from the walls, above signs that read, IT SHOULD BE ASSUMED THERE IS A CAMERA INSIDE THIS ENCLOSURE RECORDING VIDEO AND AUDIO.
What had happened was that Permian, like thousands of other...