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As distributed surveillance networks are deployed over larger areas and in increasingly busy environments, limiting the computation, bandwidth, and human attention burdens imposed is becoming critical. We describe a system addressing this problem which uses layered, in-network processing on each camera to filter out uninteresting events locally, avoiding disambiguation and tracking of irrelevant environmental distractors. Coupled with this is a factor-graph-based resource allocation algorithm which steers pan-tilt cameras to follow interesting targets while maintaining a "peripheral awareness" of emerging new targets. We describe this distributed attention mechanism and our implementation of this high-level architecture in a video sensor network.