Does Schneier have some association to the NSA I don't know about? I'd normally consider that statement as weak evidence they did make the changes in good faith.
Making late (in this case, after the competition was already over) changes to a crytographic primitive - without extensive documentation both of why that's necessary (not just helpful) and why it's not possible (not just you promise it doesn't) for that to weaken security or insert backdoors - is a act of either bad faith or sufficiently gross incompetence that it should be considered de facto bad faith.
Schneier claiming to believe that it's good faith implies that he either doesn't understand or (presumably more likely given his history?) doesn't care about keeping the standardization process secure against corruption by the NSA, which suggests either incompetence or bad faith on Schneier's part as well. (Or, in context, that someone was leaning on him after the earlier criticism.)
This is particularly inexcusable since reducing security parameters on the pretense that "56 bits ought to be enough for anybody" is a known NSA tactic dating back to fucking DES.
What does that have to do with anything? AFAIK Schneier's public actions are consistently pro-privacy, pro-encryption. Implying otherwise should be accompanied by evidence don't you think?
