Reading Tags at a distance is non trivial, a number of articles have speculated about the ability of anyone to read a tag as the shopper walks around a Mall. The oft quoted intrusion of privacy is the 'Electronic Passport' with an embedded RFID tag that can be read in the airport by the CIA / MI5 etc etc. The number of passports is unlikely to ever reach the number of garment tags or products tags already issued and reading your embedded EPC tag on your overnight clothes hardly makes one feel secure.

Can the RFID tag in a passport be read maliciously, that is can the data be extracted and utilised in some other nefarious scheme, does it intrude on a pre-existing civil liberty or human right.

In the US with the exception of the banking security breach disclosure requirements (mandatory California) there is no legal right to privacy. Rights exist in Intellectual Property of an individuals products but no overarching right to privacy. In the EU, country specific and EU laws dictate what rights exist in each state. The UK is highly liberal except for libel and slander, whilst France is the opposite -a tightly controlled legal framework with dramatic penalties for breaches.

So what right is surrendered by the inclusion of an RFID chip in a passport?

Security issues are separate, different in the fundamentals. Modern RFID chips can be read over significant local distances. Whilst a few specialists have read tags over far larger distances this is not indicative of a wide spread issue. At 900  MHz (modern tag frequencies) transmitting a high powered RF field to interrogate a tag is non trivial procedure. To deliver to a tag at a distance of 500 meters the equivalent of a close coupled device would demand that the transmitter power be increased by tens of thousands. Apart from the power supply needs, that amount of local output power will saturate all the front end circuits of mobile phones, people will notice!....

The listening into of a tag interrogation (read/write) then should be examined, can tags be eavesdropped into without prior knowledge and a breach of security be generated?

Under what circumstances does this constitute a serious issue. We can generally ignore transmissions to/from garments and goods since the information will usually be product or batch codes. (this data may be useful to industrial spies but is an expensive way of acquiring competitive intelligence)