Anyway -- I regard most of those warnings as quite overblown. I mean, on lots of subway cars you stand out more if you don't have white earbuds in, probably attached to iPhones. Midtown is very safe. Your laptop bag doesn't have to say "laptop" on it to be recognized as such, but there are so many other people with laptop bags that you won't stand out if you have one. Subway crime? The average daily ridership is about 5,000,000; there are on average 9 felonies a day on the whole system. To quote a city police official I met, that makes the subways by far the safest city in the world.
That's probably an abuse of statistics.
Yes, you're probably at more risk if you look like a tourist. But there are lots of ways to do that, like waiting for a "walk" sign before crossing the street... (Visiting Tokyo last month was quite a shock to my system; I had to unlearn all sorts of things.)
Looking and acting like you belong is good advice in most circumstances. Act like the other monkeys. If you don't give someone reason to question you, they probably won't. Wait, oh, that's the guide book for infiltrating facilities ... ;-) ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.