Who are the Peregrini – and why does it matter now?
In 242 BC, the Roman Republic did something that had no precedent in the ancient world.
Rome had been expanding for generations – absorbing territories, entering alliances, and drawing free men and women from across the known world into its commercial and civic life. These men and women were not slaves. They were not outlaws. They were free, they traded, they built, they moved. But they were not Roman citizens. They stood outside the ius civile – the civil law reserved for citizens – and the existing legal machinery had no adequate way to deal with them.
So Rome created one.
The office of praetor peregrinus – the magistrate of the free men – was established to administer justice specifically for those who stood outside the citizen register. The praetor peregrinus applied the ius gentium – the law of peoples – a body of legal principle understood to be common to all free men and women regardless of their citizenship, their origin, or the civil register they stood outside.
The word for these free men and women was peregrinus. It derives from per (through) and ager (field, land) – one who travels through the land. A traveller. A wayfarer. A man or woman moving through the world without being captured by it.
A peregrinus was not outside the law. That is the critical distinction. A peregrinus was outside the register. They had full recourse to law – to the ius gentium that governed all free men and women – and the Roman state recognised and administered that recourse through a dedicated magistrate for over four centuries.
The category endured until 212 AD, when the Emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to virtually all free men within the empire through the Constitutio Antoniniana. The register expanded to absorb almost everyone. The peregrinus ceased to be a recognised legal category – not because the principle was wrong, but because the state had extended its administrative reach far enough to make the distinction largely moot.
It is not moot now.
The register being built today
A new kind of register is being constructed – street by street, shop by shop, camera by camera – without the knowledge, consent, or agreement of the men and women being entered into it.
Facial recognition systems deploy algorithms that map the geometry of a face – the distance between eyes, the shape of a jaw, the contour of a brow – and match it against databases that may contain millions of entries. The system does not need to know your name to identify you. It needs only to have seen your face before.
Number plate recognition systems log the movement of vehicles across road networks, building a picture of where a vehicle – and by extension its driver – has been, when, and how often. That data is stored, cross-referenced, and in many cases shared between government agencies and private operators.
Gait analysis takes the identification further still. The way a man or woman walks – the length of their stride, the rhythm of their step, the angle of their posture – is as distinctive as a fingerprint. Systems now exist that can identify an individual by gait alone, even when the face is obscured, even when no other identifying information is visible.
Audio capture systems analyse voice patterns in public and commercial spaces. Aggregated movement data builds behavioural profiles. Every data point feeds a larger picture.
The operators of these systems – councils, retailers, transport authorities, government agencies, private security companies – have built their frameworks on a single shared assumption: that a man or woman who enters a space has, by that act of entry alone, consented to all of this.
That assumption has no foundation in law.
Presence is not consent. Silence is not agreement. Walking through a door is not a signature on a data processing contract. No operator has the right to collect, process, store, share, or monetise the biometric data of a man or woman who has not agreed to it – and no assumption of agreement can be drawn from the simple fact of being present.
The Peregrini
The Peregrini are the men and women who assert that position.
The name is deliberate. A peregrinus in the Roman sense was a free man or woman who moved through a space without being captured by its administrative register. A Peregrinus today is a free man or woman who moves through a surveilled space without consenting to be captured by its data register. The parallel is not rhetorical. It is exact.
The Peregrini are a people – not a club, not an incorporated association, not a protest movement, and not a political organisation. A people, in the sense recognised by international law, is a group of men and women bound by a common identity, a common set of values, and a common interest in determining their own future without outside interference.
The Peregrini share all of those things.
They share a common identity – rooted in the ancient standing of free men and women outside the civil register, carried forward from its formal recognition in 242 BC, and asserted today by living men and women who stand in their own right outside the biometric data collection framework.
They share a common position in law – the withdrawal of consent to biometric data collection, asserted openly, in their own names, on their own authority, and on the record.
They share a common cultural and juridical heritage in the ius gentium and the common law tradition that draws on it.
They share a common interest in self-determination – the right to move through the world freely, to pursue their own economic, social, and cultural development, without having their faces, voices, gaits, and movements harvested and monetised without their agreement.
Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – both binding on Australia as a signatory – state without qualification that all peoples have the right of self-determination. The Australian Government’s own Attorney-General’s Department confirms in its published guidance that this right entails at minimum the entitlement of peoples to have control over their destiny, and that it is not subject to easy limitation or derogation.
No instrument of international law, no treaty body, and no court has ever fixed a minimum number at which a group of men and women becomes a people. The right attaches to what is shared and what is asserted together – not to the size of the group asserting it.
The Peregrini claim that right. It is theirs on the same terms and under the same instruments as any other people.
How the position works in practice
The Peregrini are not a protest. They do not march. They do not demonstrate. They move through the world as they have always moved – through shops, along streets, into government buildings, onto public transport – and they do so with their position stated, documented, and on the record.
A man or woman stands as Peregrinus by their own declaration – made in their own words, in their own hand, dated and kept for their own records. That declaration is the foundation. It establishes the point in time from which the withdrawal of consent is documented. It is a considered, deliberate statement of position, not a reaction to any single incident.
From that foundation, a Peregrinus may serve a formal notice on any operator of biometric surveillance – a council, a retailer, a government agency, a transport authority. That notice sets out the position in law, withdraws consent specifically and in writing, and incorporates a Calderbank offer and liquidated damages schedule. From the date of service, any collection of that Peregrinus’ biometric data is collection against a documented and noticed withdrawal of consent. The operator accumulates liability with every breach.
The Peregrinus identifier – worn on a shirt, a hat, a hoody – extends that notice visibly into every space the man or woman enters. Any operator who has received the class notice served on behalf of the Peregrini cannot claim ignorance of the position of any man or woman displaying the identifier in their surveilled space.
The strength of the Peregrini lies not in any organisation but in the record – built notice by notice, declaration by declaration, breach by breach, across every space where free men and women choose to assert who they are.
Why now
Biometric surveillance at the scale now operating in Australia was not possible a generation ago. The technology is recent. The legal frameworks around it are still being written – and the operators deploying these systems have moved far faster than the law has followed.
That gap is not an accident. It is the space in which an assumption of consent was quietly installed – not by legislation, not by agreement, but by the simple act of building the systems and operating them as though consent had been given.
The Peregrini close that gap.
Not with legislation. Not with lobbying. With the law that already exists – the common law that has always protected the inherent rights of free men and women, the ius gentium that governed free men and women outside the civil register for centuries, and the international covenant that binds Australia to respect the right of all peoples to determine their own future.
The operators had no right to this data. They had nothing to give and nothing to sell.
Nemo potest plus iuris ad alium transferre quam ipse habet. No one can transfer to another more right than they themselves have.
From the date a Peregrinus’ declaration is made, that position is stated, visible, and on the record.
When you are ready, you may wish to stand as one of the Peregrini.
All Rights Reserved – Without Prejudice – Without Recourse
Last Updated 4 months ago
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