A bit late myself, but to clarify: Making late (in this case, after the competition was already over) changes to a crytographic primitive - without extensive d

A bit late myself, but to clarify: 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.