U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Wednesday called the whistleblower Edward Snowden a "coward" and a "traitor" in response to the latest comments Snowden made in an interview with NBC.

"Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor and he has betrayed his country," Kerry told NBC. "And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so."

"If this man is a patriot, he should stay in the United States and make his case," he said. "Patriots don't go to Russia, they don't seek asylum in Cuba, they don't seek asylum in Venezuela, they fight their cause here."

"The bottom line is this is a man who has betrayed his country," Kerry said in an interview with CBS, "He should man up and come back to the United States if he has a complaint about what's the matter with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case."

"We'd be delighted for him to come back. He should come back. That's what a patriot would do. A patriot would not run away and look for refuge in Russia or Cuba or some other country. A patriot would stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people," Kerry told NBC.

"The fact is if he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice," Kerry said.

Kerry blamed Snowden for the damage he has inflicted on the US by leaking enormous amount of information to the public.

"He has damaged his country very significantly in many, many ways," Kerry told CBS. "He has hurt operational security. He has told terrorists what they can now do to be able to avoid detection. And I find it sad and disgraceful."

In an interview with NBC Snowden blamed the U.S. authority for undermining the Constitution and putting him in a difficult position.

"The reality is, the situation determined that this needed to be told to the public. The Constitution of the United States had been violated on a massive scale," Snowden said. "Now, had that not happened, had the government not gone too far and overreached, we wouldn't be in a situation where whistleblowers were necessary."

He considered himself a patriot. "I think it's important to remember that people don't set their lives on fire," he said. "They don't walk away from their extraordinarily, extraordinarily comfortable lives....for no reason."

"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I'm not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine," Snowden said.

He said he was a technical expert and did not recruit agents. "What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I've done that at all levels from — from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top."

He also said that he had no other choice but to seek asylum in Russia because the United States revoked his passport.

Snowden, a former contractor of the National Security Agency (NSA), faces charges of espionge in the United States for leaking large tranch of classified files concerning U.S. surveillance programs to the news outlets including The Washington Post and The Guardian.

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