Santa Monica College instructor Ryan McMillen has been named as the linchpin, in a roundabout way, for the shutdown of web services in Burma, aka Myanmar, by the ruling dictatorship.

McMillen was sent the video of Japanese photographer Kenji Nagai being shot dead at point-blank range by a soldier chasing demonstrators on the streets of Rangoon. McMillen uploaded the video to the I-Reporter service on CNN.com, according to Bangkok based Joel Gershon for The Hollywood Reporter, as printed in Washington Post via Reuters. Yahoo! News has the story as well.

LAist is all on the job, and Andy Sternberg points out that citizen journalism isn't supposed to work this way, but he's ranting about American Media using McMillen as a scapegoat, when there's just the one story that names McMillen.

The bigger questions are who sent McMillen the video, what happened to that person, and where's the film from Nagai's camera?