Is it dangerous looking up stuff like Al Qaeda, weapons, Bin Laden, etc on the Internet?

It depends how deep you research. If you look at making bombs then clearly you are a nutter and they need to step in. If you are just reading news articles like MILLIONS of other people, they don't care nor could they stop that many people investigating.

I used to work in an office with a young muslim lad, who was becoming increasingly involved in his faith.

A month after I left the company, the office was raided by armed police because he'd been looking at websites that raised red flags. To be honest though, I don't know what kinds of things he was looking at. He was a nice guy and I doubt there was any malicious intent - he just got curious about the wrong things.

I'd recommend sticking to reputable news websites (like the BBC) for that kind of info, rather than using google/wikipedia. I'd imagine there are quite a few reports giving the details of Osamas life.

At the moment you would be one of many who would like more details on the life and death of Bin Laden so depending on what sort of questions you were asking would decide if you were being scrutinised or not .

The FBI are not the only ones who scan the net to see who is doing what to whom just about every nation has its fair share of spooks who scan the net for interesting statistics however if you were researching how to build a nuclear device things might be different.

I am quite sure all sites carrrying information on this sort of thing are closely monitored on both sides of the Atlantic, be prepared to be watched if you delve too deeply, probably best to just stick toWiki!

If you are worried about privacy violation, use tor. Its a free browser that hides what you do from everyone. I would use that without being worried about authorities, as I'm not sure I can guarantee no note being taken by anybody.

Why do you want to look up that stuff to start with. I mean there is enough of that in the news to satisfy any curiosity. I guess if you want to you could still look it up and I can't see any harm it would do to security to do so. That's why we have the internet to get the background of things.

This isn't some communist dictatorship state where such activity would cause a "knock on the door". If you're not a terrorist sleep easy in free America.

do you know how many times those words have been looked up in the last 2 days? either do i but its impossible to track. and im pretty sure they have better things to do than raid your little world.

Nope, you are British I would guess, seeing as you post from the UK site.

You are free to search wherever you like.

GCHQ know what you are doing anyway, so it hardly matters.

no of course not unless you wrote 'i'm a terrorist and i want to kill people' in google