Perturbed mouse pad inference

["Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rMslade () shaw ca>]

Through the kind offices of a friend who "works at Fort Meade," I now have a 
genuine NSA mouse pad.  It has a soft plastic pad, topped with the NSA seal.  
(Which is an eagle, not a seal.)  Which is topped with yet another sheet of plastic, 
trapping a small amount of water (average depth about 2 mm) and a few air 
bubbles.

The extra water (and possibly the bubbles) make it difficult to use an optical 
mouse (the only kind I've got available for testing, at the moment) with precision. 
 With your hand resting on the mouse, displacement of the water makes the 
pointer move, even if the mouse doesn't.

a)  Can anyone tell me why the extra sheet of water?  I don't believe I've ever 
heard of such a thing.

b)  For years I've been trying to teach students about the use of small, random 
corruption of data returns (aka noise or perturbation), in extremely high security 
databases, to foil inference attacks.  Well-schooled in the "I" of the CIA (no, this 
isn't inter-agency rivalry) triad, they refuse to believe me.  If nobody can give me 
a valid answer to question a, can I now use this mouse pad as evidence that the 
NSA implicitly supports the idea?

======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade () vcn bc ca     slade () victoria tc ca     rslade () computercrime org
 ... if they go to church sometimes, and abstain from the
grossest acts of mortal sin, though they are ignorant of the
spirit and power of godliness and have no sense of the love of
God and universal benevolence, yet they rest well satisfied of
their salvation and are pleased to think they may enjoy the world
as much as they can while they live and have heaven in reserve
when they die.                                      - Susanna Wesley
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