Smile for the cameras, kids

Also, the Dig reports, the city hasn't come up with any privacy policies for all those photos

This is the issue. Taking security photos isn't a big deal (although many, like myself, would have liked to know this was going on). its how the photos are going to be used. Like body scanners at the airport, the image is destroyed seconds later if no subject able items were scanned.

tsk tsk on the city for not having policies in place before doing this.

Ended because they couldn't figure out a good excuse to bug a rock concert.

Right.

Have these security theater buffoons ever even heard of the scientific method?

On second thought, who needs rational experimentation. This could have implications for drug testing! Yes, who cares about informed consent or patient rights, lets have drug companies dump stuff in municipal water supplies and see what happens. They can decide later if it will cure an illness or not.

It also pisses me off that they try to spin this in terms of "event management". If that is so, then they should have learned in 2013 that they needed to have an obvious, highly visible medical tent so that alert geezers like me wouldn't have to hunt for TEN FUCKING MINUTES to find that one person who knew who to contact and what to do about a girl in the crowd who was damn near catatonic.

City officials did not extend the program to this year's concerts in part because they couldn't figure out a good public-safety need to do so.

Baffling. They should have just used the public safety need they justified it with the past two times.

Also, in the absence of a privacy policy for the photos they've taken, the safest action is to destroy them all. If they have no public safety need to create new ones and they have no privacy policy in place for the ones they took, then there is all the risk and zero reward for keeping them. Just destroy them and back out of this First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment nightmare before something goes wrong.