A different way China spies on the West: malware infested Android boxes

By Sheila Gunn Reid
|
March 03, 2021

By Ezra Levant

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Monday morning, I spent eight hours listening in on a hearing for a court case involving Allarco Entertainment and four major Canadian retailers.

Allarco is a company you might better know as Super Channel, and it is currently in a court battle with Canadian retailers over something commonly known as an Android box.

The Canadian retailers selling the Android box involved in the court case are London Drugs, Staples, Canada Computers and Best Buy. These Android boxes are piracy devices available for just a few hundred dollars that allow for free streaming of TV and movie content.

Allarco is taking these four retailers to court for various copyright violations, and since Allarco is based in Alberta, the case is being heard in Edmonton.

Allarco pays producers of content and movies for the right to broadcast them. Then people like me and you, the consumer, pay for Super Channel subscriptions so that we can see the content they've paid for.

But in the middle of this come these little Android boxes, these too good to be true streaming devices. And I say too good to be true because there's a real hitch here for the regular consumer, aside from the financial losses that Allarco is experiencing because of piracy.

This is what Chinese infiltration really looks like on a day-to-day basis.

Chinese infiltration isn't always the mandarins in Beijing putting pressure on the NBA to prevent pro-Hong Kong messaging from being printed on the back of basketball jerseys.

And it's not necessarily as in your face as Justin Trudeau and the Liberals refusing to declare what China is doing to the Uyghur ethnic and religious minority a genocide.

And it's not as simple as a Chinese spy agency masquerading as a telecom company called Huawei, buying sponsored ads to talk about how great they are in the National Post, a newspaper which takes thousands of dollars from Justin Trudeau every single week.

It's sometimes more sinister and sneaky than that — actually, it's more sinister and sneaky as a rule.

These devices are how China spies on you and gains access to everything that your Google account controls.

These made in China devices contain malware.

If China is offering you something for free, it's never really free. Because these piracy devices are a Chinese listening device into your home. You get movies and sports for free; you just have to let the Chinese government into your house and give them access to just about everything about you.

And trusted Canadian retailers are selling them to unsuspecting Canadians. Big box stores are selling devices full of malware that rob Canadian broadcasters like Super Channel of exclusive content that they've paid money for, while simultaneously infecting your life with Chinese spyware.

Like I said, I sat in on eight hours of arguments today in this ongoing hearing via WebEx, as the hearing is taking place at the Court of Queen’s Bench in Edmonton. For the rest of the week, I'll be swapping out with my colleague Keean Bexte, who's in COVID quarantine for the next two weeks. To be clear, he's perfectly healthy, but Keean just returned from reporting in Florida, and those are Trudeau’s rules.

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