Angus King quotes:

I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.

If it's necessary to join a caucus and get a committee assignment, I'll do it.

My desire is to be as independent as I can be, as long as I can be, subject to being effective.

Well, first let's say that the fundamental responsibility of any government is national security - in the preamble to the Constitution, provide for the common defense and insure domestic tranquility.

It's hard running as an independent. I wouldn't have won the Senate election if I hadn't been governor. I had credibility. The hard part is getting voters to the point where they think it's thinkable and not a waste of time.

I've come to realize that an unencumbered U.S. senator is a profound threat to the whole system. It's somebody that they can't put in a box and say, 'Oh, well, we know how this guy is going to vote.'

One of my life principles is that if something isn't working, doing something harder isn't necessarily going to produce the same result.

Every day in America, about 25,000 people buy a quarter-inch drill. But nobody in America wants a quarter-inch drill. What they want are holes.

I think it's important to also realize that this isn't a case of Apple being asked to simply flip a switch or, you know, plug in a wire from one place to another. They're being asked to write new software that doesn't exist. They purposefully did not create this kind of backdoor...

There's a host of difficult issues here, and that's why when you mentioned at the top of the show that the committees were looking at this, that's where I think we should be going.

I haven't seen - I haven't heard the arguments that would make that case. And I haven't seen a proposal yet that satisfies the objections. The problem is, you create a key like this, and it can't - it's hard to say that it's going to be hidden. And then it becomes used both by our government in multiple cases, but also it could get out as far as hackers are concerned or other countries.

What do we do if we pass a law that says this has to be done, and then China says, oh, well, OK, we're going to pass that law too and we want access to every iPhone in China? Iran says the same thing, Russia says the same thing - you know, the bad guys go underground. They'll shift to some other encrypted platform.

The intelligence community, in particular the FBI, have been sounding alarms about this for more than a year. So to argue that suddenly we have to do this because of the San Bernardino case doesn't really pass the straight-face test. I mean, they've been talking about this. And to say, well, it will only apply to this case, that just - that doesn't wash. This is a major piece of public policy.

I would say it would be worth it if, in fact, it would - if you could demonstrate that that would be the case and that the results and ramifications around the world wouldn't lead to more problems and more people dying. It's a very complex issue, and that's why I think we need to decide it.