When Mans Adler founded Bambuser—a Sweden-based service that lets people broadcast live video from their cell phones to the Internet—his idea was simply to help users share their lives with friends in real time. Early this year, however, Adler saw an explosion of use from a political powder keg: Egypt.

During the Arab Spring, pro-democracy activists discovered that Bambuser let them thwart the Egyptian secret police. If a protester filmed an incident of police brutality, it didn’t matter whether they were arrested and their phone confiscated: The footage had already streamed to the world, where it catalyzed political energy against the Mubarak regime.

“The police thought, if we take all the phones, we can control the information. But they didn’t,” Adler notes. “The message still got out.”

The Arab uprisings showed that the use of video as a monitoring tool has shifted decisively. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, civil libertarians worried about governments and corporations slapping up surveillance cameras all over the place. The fear was that they’d be used as tools of oppression. But now those tools are being democratized, and we are witnessing an emerging culture of “sousveillance.”

Sousveillance is the monitoring of events not by those above (surveiller in French) but by citizens, from below (sous-). The neologism was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto. In the ’90s, Mann rigged a head-mounted camera to broadcast images online and found that it was great for documenting everyday malfeasance, like electrical-code violations. He also discovered that it made security guards uneasy. They’d ask him to remove the camera—and when he wouldn’t, they’d escort him away or even tackle him.

“I realized, this is the inverse of surveillance,” he said.

Granted, omnipresent recording is a double-edged sword. When activists posted videos of the protests in despotic Middle Eastern states, government agents eagerly downloaded the amateur footage and used it to identify and target dissidents.

But sousveillance will not go away. If anything, it’ll become woven ever more tightly into everyday life, with new tools arriving that let citizens document incidents in surprising new ways. Media critic Dan Gillmor envisions software that stitches together phonecam footage from several people to re-create an event in full 3-D detail. Meanwhile, Witness—a nonprofit that supports the use of video for defending human rights—is working on software that blocks out faces so dissidents can shoot scenes without endangering those in the viewfinder.

And bearing witness will get easier. Right now, sousveillance requires an act of will; you have to pull out your phone when you see something fishy. But always-on videocams are spreading. Many new cars, for example, have cameras for backing up, and forward-looking ones are gaining popularity. And wearable video devices like the Looxcie are already hitting the market: Pop one over your ear like a Bluetooth headset and it’ll capture a rolling five-hour buffer of everything you see and do, publishable to Facebook with a single click.

I recently wore a Looxcie to see what it’s like to be an instrument of sousveillance. I felt weirdly powerful, knowing nothing could escape my glance—and, like Mann, I alarmed every guard I saw. But my wife got so freaked out (“Wait, is that thing on?”) that I had to turn it off after a few hours. We can record everything; now we need a social code around doing so. Even Little Brother has to watch what he watches.

As citizens turn their videocams on the authorities, we need some new rules of engagement.

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