Bombing underscores New York subway system’s vulnerability
NEW YORK — The crude pipe bomb that exploded beneath the streets of New York this week served as a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of the city’s subway system, a 24-hour-a-day operation with 472 stations and more than 5 million daily riders.
While police say the nation’s largest subway system has some of the tightest security possible that still allows busy New Yorkers to get where they’re going, they acknowledge they can’t be everywhere or anticipate every kind of attack, particularly in this era of lone-wolf terrorism.
“It’s very difficult, and it’s getting harder,” John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, said on CBS’s “This Morning.” ”This is not the al-Qaida model, where a cell of people who are communicating with a base are an intelligence problem.”
Instead, he said, the threat is coming from people “where the conspiracy is within the confines of their own mind.”