For decades video surveillance systems have been crucial in protecting critical infrastructures. Currently the systems are adopting the emerging internetworking digital technology, changing from the traditional isolated analog technology. While there are several advantages of IP-based video surveillance systems, the systems are also exposed to additional new security threats. Security is a critical factor to make the IP-based video surveillance systems practical and usable. In this paper we address the security threats to the data communications in IP-based video surveillance systems. We first analyze the current approaches, mainly naive and selective methods, to secure real-time video data, and identify their limitations to IP-based video surveillance systems. Then we propose a system design of secure internetworking video surveillance systems. Our proposed approach adopts a randomly adjustable encryption method to provide confidentiality to the data. Our implementation and performance study demonstrate that our approach achieves a good balance of cost-efficiency and security.