At the airport, a uniformed immigration officer took my daughter’s phone, made her open her bank app, and browsed through it, without her even seeing what he was looking at. This wasn’t airport security; it was a daylight invasion. There’s a difference between protecting the nation’s borders and trampling on a citizen’s privacy with impunity.

This is where we draw the line. The Bureau of Immigration has every right to screen passengers, but that right ends where a citizen’s constitutional protections begin. Our digital lives are not open borders. An app showing a person’s private bank records should not be fair game for anyone in uniform, least of all when the owner is not allowed to watch what is being searched. It is not only unethical—it’s terrifying. And while the officer may argue it’s part of screening protocols, we cannot pretend that consent under duress is anything but coercion. If passengers are unable to refuse, then they are no longer travelers—they are hostages of the state.

What’s worse is that there is a known history of corruption inside our airports. “Tanim-bala,” extortion, mysterious delays, and now, phone intrusion—these are not isolated cases. These are symptoms of an institutional rot that has taken root in the very halls meant to ensure our freedom of movement. If even just one immigration officer abuses his power, the entire system is tarnished. Who’s to say that the officer didn’t take a screenshot of my daughter’s bank balance? Who’s to say nothing was transferred while she was made to look away? The trauma of being violated is just as real, even if nothing was actually stolen, because trust was the first thing taken.

The airport is not just a physical space; it is a theater of control. Here, citizens are stripped of power, told to obey first and ask questions later. But blind obedience is never part of a healthy democracy. When the state demands access to one’s body, bag, and now bank account, without transparency or oversight, it stops being a guardian and becomes a predator. The technology in our pockets has made us more vulnerable, and unfortunately, it has also empowered the wrong people in power to pry, to peek, and to possibly plunder.

It’s easy for government offices to justify these acts in the name of national security or anti-trafficking protocols. But let’s be clear—there’s a world of difference between catching criminals and treating every outbound passenger like a suspect. If anything, the overreach pushes the line so far back that actual human traffickers now know exactly what to avoid, while ordinary citizens bear the brunt of an oppressive and inconsistent screening system. It’s a sloppy, misplaced dragnet disguised as diligence.

And where are the guardrails? Where is the accountability? No written policy says immigration officers may rifle through private bank apps, and yet it happens. Who watches the watchers? Where can a victim even begin to report a case like this, without fearing further delays, blacklisting, or humiliation? The imbalance of power is paralyzing. If you speak up, you miss your flight. If you stay quiet, you lose your dignity. Either way, you pay a price—and it’s a price that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

We are long past the age where security meant physical bags and boarding passes. These days, a stranger in uniform can ask for your passwords, rifle through your phone, and look you in the eye as if it were his right. And we’ve let it slide, because we’ve been trained to comply. But compliance should never be mistaken for consent, and silence does not mean approval. There must be space, even at the boarding gate, to question abuses of power. To say “no” when something feels wrong. To be protected, not punished, for standing by your rights.

There needs to be a reckoning. The Department of Justice and the Bureau of Immigration must issue clear policies and draw the line on what can and cannot be done in the name of screening. Officers must be trained not just to enforce laws but to understand the dignity of those they face across their counters. If the system allows even one officer to quietly exploit another’s digital life, then it is not security that wins—it is fear.

GIVEN the current climate of our environment that is now heavily marked by new and highly absorbing things, we cannot underestimate the importance of truly sharpening our hunger for God. Nowadays, if we are not careful, we would easily get trapped by the many distractions that can lead us to pure self-indulgence.

We should try our best to echo what the disciples asked Christ when Christ told them about a certain bread that would give life to the world: “Lord, give us always this bread.” (Jn 6,34) We should always have this hunger for this bread which is no other than Christ himself who makes himself really present in the Holy Eucharist.

That way, we can have the proper focus in our life even amid the many distractions around. Yes, we may need some distractions as a way of rest and relaxation. But we should no lose our proper focus. We have to be most wary of our tendency to be so carried away by them that we compromise that focus.

At the moment, we can see a disturbing developments involving many people, especially the young. A big segment of the people is getting addicted to games and the many other novelties played out in the Internet and in the new technologies.

They are now more self-centered and self-absorbed, prone to idleness, laziness and comfort-and-pleasure seeking. Their relationship to God and to others is all but blotted out of their consciousness.

We truly need to educate our bodily and spiritual faculties so they can acquire a theological meaning and purpose and not just purely biological and temporal functions. If we truly are serious in our Christian duty to make ourselves “another Christ” who is the pattern of our humanity, then that Christian transformation of our own selves should be the goal of all our faculties—the bodily as well as our spiritual faculties.

Thus, when we experience hunger for food or thirst for some drink, or curiosity for some knowledge, it should not just be food and drink and knowledge that we should be interested in. We should not remain in the level of the material and temporal aspects of our life. Our hunger and thirst should also lead us to God first of all.

In fact, more than food and drink and earthly knowledge, it should be God, his will and ways that we should be more interested in. We have to train ourselves to realize that our biological hunger and thirst and curiosity for knowledge can fully be satisfied only when we fulfill the will of God.

In this regard, we should see to it that in everything that we do, we should have the right intention. Indeed, we have to be most careful in handling our intentions, since they play a strategic role in our life. How and where we direct them would determine whether we want to be with God or simply to be with our own selves.

Our intentions express who and where in the end we want to be. Do we choose God, or do we simply choose ourselves, or the world in general? We’re actually always a choice between good and evil.

Even if we are not aware, or refuse to be aware, of this choice, which is usually the case, the choice between God and us, between good and evil is always made with every human act we do.

We need to realize then that we have to take utmost care of our intention, making it as explicit as possible, and honing it to get engaged with its proper and ultimate object who is God.