For five years now, the US Government has been trying to understand why diplomats, soldiers and indeed White House officials suddenly fall sick in particular locations. There has been speculation that the illness is the accidental effect of some kind of device intended to harvest data from cellphones or other mobile devices. However, those devices are all powered by batteries and do not need to be strongly energised by RF radiation (a plausible cause of the ill-effects) in order for data to be harvested.
RFID cards and tags, however, do need to be energised by an RF signal in order for them to be read, and if the intent is to read them at a significant distance, they need to be strongly energised.
In the past five years, "contactless" bank cards have become universal and these are RFID devices, and as far as Medawar knows, everyone of the suspected victims has a job requiring them to have an RFID pass of some kind to activate the security measures (which may also include biometrics once the process is triggered by the RFID device) which get them in and out of their place of work. Indeed, the two White House officials in recent reports were both in the process of gaining access to the White House site when they were struck down with a mystery illness.
One has to ask whether or not the SVR (to pick a suspect not at all at random) has an interest in either gaining access to America's most secure sites and diplomatic premises or identifying and tracking those who enjoy such access? Some entities would not want to seriously harm people just to read their data, but Russian state entities have a history of not caring tuppence about hurting or even killing people in the course of their daily activities.
When RFID access cards were first marketed in the eighties, the marketing suggested that they could work at fifty metres: this had a negative effect on user confidence so the advertised range was dialed down, and dialed down further once contactless RFID devices started to replace money and people made accidental payments for other people's bills. But all RFID devices can be read at a significant distance if strongly energised, via a directional aerial and the answering signal also read through a good directional aerial with a high-quality RF receiver attached.
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