I have cousins there, but they live on the outskirts. Lovely city.

Shutting down an entire city or two? Pretty impressive.

I'm honestly appalled at this. Keep in mind that all over the Middle East, suicide bombers and the like are nearly daily events, and they don't shut everything down.

I mean, with the Marathon bombers, there was a concrete, clear and present danger to public safety. In addition to the bombing, they had just murdered an MIT police officer in cold blood, carjacked someone at gunpoint, and engaged in a shootout in a residential neighborhood while chucking IEDs at police officers (and I could hear those from miles away). If there ever was a time to go all out, that's not a bad one. And they called off the extraordinary measures at the end of the day...

The danger here is completely abstract. I can't presume to know what the intelligence is that they are acting off of, so perhaps this is all justified, but at what point will it be safe to resume normal activities? And if all it takes is a threat of attack to stop the whole city, it's going to become very cheap for terrorist groups to be completely disruptive... you don't even have to sacrifice yourself anymore...just make up "convincing" attack plans... that is, until everyone gets lulled into complacency because of all the "false alarms."