"This is a digital hijack!" intones a husky voice, summoning images of a leather-clad Brigitte Nielsen in her late-'80s fetishwear glory.

"Free Kevin Mitnick now!"

The beat kicks in - a catchy, Euro-technopop melody that emanates a distinct digital telephone-beeping, postmodem-coupling, coital glow. The quality of sound off the plastic FlexiDisc isn't bad - significantly better than the RealAudio version on the Digital Hijack site.

And this is not entirely a joke, though the lines between prank, self-promotion, and hard-coded reality are mighty blurred. Welcome to the next step in the evolution of the Web: The invasion of the search-engine snatchers.

etoy: "The popstar is the programmer is the architect is the designer is the manager is the system is etoy."

They call themselves "etoy" and they're a seven-person band of hackers distributed across Europe. Their claim to fame is their widespread deployment of a sophisticated method of reverse engineering Web-based search engines. Their goal - aside from the junkie buzz that comes from "smashing the boring style of electronic traffic channels" - is to kidnap webcrawling humans and inject a little uncertainty into life on the Web.

"We want to stretch reality, play the game between business, art, and entertainment," says Lucius Brainhard, etoy's specialist in "communications/words."

"We identify as a band. A new way of playing the soundtrack for a new traveling generation. We play this soundtrack with different instruments like graphics, Infoseek-flooding robots, C-animation and ASCII-text as part of the show. Our stage is the Web."

Some think the show they present is a sham designed to drive up their own hit counts and grab press attention. They're an annoyance to engineers of search engines everywhere, or yet another manifestation of the spreading plague of "spamdexing." But etoy may be an indicator of things to come. As the Web spreads its tentacles, it is indeed becoming the ultimate stage, a low-cost platform for stunts with a potential audience of millions. Let the games begin!

"The digital hijack attacks everyone, everywhere. There is no security."

Spamdexing has come a long way from the halcyon days of the summer of 1995. Back then, all one needed to do was add the word "sex" a thousand times at the end of a Web page to attract attention from the likes of Lycos. The search-engine operators caught on fast, so the spamdexers tagged all the fake keywords in the same color as the background of the page. Human visitors don't realize they've hit a spamdex page - while colorblind Web robots see all and index all.

Etoy took spamdexing and turned it into an art. Their home-grown bot, Ivana, is given a list of keywords - hundreds of them, ranging from "Porsche" to "Psion." Ivana plugs those keywords into a particular search engine - Infoseek, for example - and then retrieves the URLs for the top 20 rankings for that keyword. Those documents are then examined to see which particular combination of keywords generated the highest ranking. Ivana then mimics the pattern, creates its own HTML file, and places it on the hijack server.

So a fan of arty European sports cars drops by WebCrawler, and types the word "Porsche" into the query form. No. 3 on the returned list of URLs is a page entitled Porsche and More. But click on that URL, and after spending a few seconds at a page brimming with the word Porsche, one is suddenly whisked (or, more technically, redirected) to the Digital Hijack main page. There, one finds the "free-Mitnick" manifesto, wedged between a smorgasbord of delightfully incomprehensible broken English art-hacker geekspeak.

When I contacted Brainhard via email, I got more of the same, as well as a package via snail mail that included the FlexiDisc, some etoy stickers, and more Mitnick monkey business. Clearly, these folks are a cut above your average hit-and-run Web hustlers.

"The hijack-project is more some sort of a 'virtual' movie, a story, an Internet-spectacle," Brainhard told me in an email. "It does not include a pragmatic political message or anything like that. We don't really scream for a revolution, because the systems are too complex ... we want to be more like a pointer to think about the relationship towards search systems, hacking, government control, censorship, speed, good and bad! In a different way than, for example, the 'freedom of speech' movement does. ANOTHER CONFUSING VIEWPOINT FOR A CONFUSING WORLD."

All well and good. Let a hundred hackers bloom, I say. But, being the good, law-abiding Internet citizen that I am (as well as a coldhearted, objective journalist), I immediately alerted the authorities. I sent some email to Brian Pinkerton, chief technical officer for AOL's WebCrawler, and told him to check out Porsches and More.