Disabling clickpad on an ASUS E402M

I am stuck with an undocumented pointing device on an ASUS E402M running Belenos with previously unknown keyboard issues in gedit at least.
(Originally sold with windows 10 compatible Intuitive Smart Gesture touchpad)

I tried but was unable to get results from "synclient -l" which reported "Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?"

I consulted Ubuntu forums telling them I am a Trisquel user. Finally, after several downvotes, a user, who could hardly believe that xinput was not installed on my system because it is a dependency of xorg which drives the graphical user interface, suggested I do:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall xinput

Now xinput --list gave me results.
I was finally able to track down: xinput list-props "ImPS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse"
and with xinput --watch-props 16
the only Axis Labels were "Rel X" and "Rel Y"
To disable it entirely in Belenos: xinput disable 16
Since there appears to be no way to change the mapping of the touchpad surface area to prevent "Rel X" and "Rel Y" from changing when touching the click switch positions, it was essential to get rid of all the annoyances (including tap to click) by disabling the clickpad entirely.

The clickpad on my ASUS machine doesn't have discrete left and right click switches, but relies on absolute touch coordinates that are kept opaque from the user. I know, I am running non-free firmware and should wear sunglasses when in front of the screen, but is it really so difficult to have access to the touchpad raw grid data?

Even on a clean Trisquel 7 installation xinput would return "not found." I deduce that the Gnome desktop (ver 3.8.4) doesn't use xorg to drive the graphical user interface. Is that correct? Why couldn't a clean installation allow people to at least disable intrusively disfunctional firmware accessories?