September 16, 2002 (Monday)
- U.S. plan to invade Iraq: Colin Powell meets with the United Nations Security Council to push for stronger resolutions against Iraq. In a surprise reversal, Iraq tells the United Nations it will allow weapons inspectors "immediately and without condition."
- Cryptography: A worrying theoretical cryptanalytic attack on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has been announced in a paper by Nicolas Courtois and Josef Pieprzyk entitled "Cryptanalysis of Block Ciphers with Overdefined Systems of Equations". This appears to show a surprising potential theoretical weakness in the AES algorithm.