Internet-based video surveillance systems are now widespread in the modern e-Society, since they can be used to manage multiple physical security problems in a lot of contexts. Moreover, the growing diffusion of portable device, along with the necessity of keeping specific environments and motion events under control, brought out the need for more flexible and proactive systems, which allow the management of such scenarios. However, most of the state of the art video surveillance systems are known to be unscalable, unreliable, insecure, and do not provide adequate guarantees for user awareness when a determined situation of interest occurs. Furthermore, almost all the currently defined systems, lack in operation flexibility: they are designed for a specific context and can not be easily adapted to the different ones.In this work, we propose general-purpose video surveillance system, which is fully distributed and accessible through ubiquitous portable devices. Such system, whose architecture is based on a self-organizing overlay network built on top of a mixture of already existing physical network connections, provides an high degree of reliability for the interactions among all its components, and ensures to its users, regardless of where they are located, the ability to receive notifications upon the occurrence of interesting events.