Originally Posted by
QUERY
You are implying that Schneier is somehow the only expert in cryptology and that the methods he used were the only ones that could be used(which he doesn't elaborate on). The NSA probably have some of the best cryptographers working for them. Also, if they have access to the laptop and if a hard drive encryption utility was not used, they will have access to many plaintext files as well. In addition, they have the owner's identity and personal info on him as well.
Chances are if they can break it, someone else can. They're paranoid enough that if it can be broken in a reasonable amount of time, published or not, it won't be used to protect TS data.
AES is expected to protect TS until at least 2030 with the 256 bit implementation. If you want to tell if AES is getting closer to being broken sooner for start looking for NIST competitions sooner than that and for NSA's Suite B to be updated before then.