The reason? The $ 29.99 cyberpet -- now a collectors' item and going for thrice the listed price -- comes equipped with computer chips, infrared transmitters and receivers. Furbies can speak, interact with their environment, and sshhhh, repeat some of what they hear.

While the NSA may be looking to flush out Furbies from its premises, the rest of America is haring after them. Furby fever is just the latest in a growing trend that's thrown up sleeker, snazzier, and ever smarter toys and dolls that psychologists and sociologists warn may lead to unforeseen consequences,especially for children.

Among other recent hits: Playmates' Amazing Amy, a wonder doll/brat that has 500K of computer memory and is programmed to use more than 10,000 phrases, including throwing tantrums about what food she wants to eat and what clothes she wants to wear. Mattel's My Interactive Pooh, which can be programmed to say a child's name, ``remember'' her birthday, and tell her favourite bed time stories. Some of the new playthings are imitative not just of the voice and manners, but resemble the child itself. For instance, Toys R Us advertises My Twinn, a mail order doll. It is a ``clone'' of your child made from a picture and details you send about your child's eye colour, skin tone, hair colour and style, and down to the last mole and freckle.

Another new craze: Spice Dolls. American pre-teen girls are clamouring for the $ 56 Spice World Superstar Collection which includes four dolls of the Spice Girls. Other latest hits include Betty Spaghetty and Make Me A Better Baby, which not only coughsbut has a fever and an ear infection. ``If this trend continues, social skills that children develop by human interaction will be first casualty. It may also lead to more convergence thinking -- learning what the computer wants you to -- instead of the more natural divergence thinking which comes out of natural learning,'' says Dorothy Skinner, a Yale University child psychologist.

For the $ 22-billion American toy industry, however, it's boom time. Firms like Mattel and Hasbro are cranking them out by the hour. The result: Americans now spend a record $ 350 per child per year (which is about the per capita income of India) on playthings, and it's growing.

``Every year, there's a new craze. If it was Tickle Me Elmo and Beanie Babies last year, it's Furbies and Amazing Amy this year. The industry is on a roll,'' says Marisa Gordon of the Toy Manufacturers Association of America. Adds Singer: ``An average American child's playpen is full of discarded toys because of the rapid turnover.''

The toy boom,fuelled partly by the marriage of technology and marketing, has raised the stakes and the profile in what was for many years a backwoods industry. New York's Fashion Institute of Technology now has a world's first and foremost graduate program in toy design whose 120 alumni work in some of top toy-making firms across the country. Still, some old favourites still rule the roost. The top-selling item last year was Hot Wheels, modest 91-cent toy cars from Mattel that have been careening around since the late '60s. But the other old favourites, board games, are experiencing a downturn. Sales of board games declined by 15 per cent last year, according to toy industry estimates. Late last year, Hasbro, which owns the popular Scrabble title, closed down its East Coast factory which for years made scrabble tiles from soft Vermont wood, and moved that facility overseas where production will be cheaper.

In part, the decline of board games is because plays like Monopoly and The Game of Life now have electronic,computer, or online versions. Clearly, technology and innovation are the ``mummy-daddy'' of the toy industry. Consider this: Furby, which has as much memory as an old Apple II computer, is capable of 300 different combinations of eye, ear and mouth movements. Bull Frogg and Puppy So Real, two toys which debuted last year, use something called a Bend Sensor technology which acts like a central nervous system in the toy. Bull Frogg can tell whether it is being touched hard or softly and whether someone is speaking to it in a loud voice or low voice and formulate dozens of different voice responses through its seven body sensors.

So is the fun going out of playthings? Not really, say toy industry veterans. Innovation and reinvention is the name of the game. So while scrabble has quickly moved online to facilitate long distance play, other oldies like the yo-yo (which, if you hadn't heard, means ``come, come'' in Tagalog, the language of the Philippines) now comes with new bells and whistles like transaxles,centrifugal clutches, ball bearings and brake pads. Yo-Yos can now spin up to a minute and come back. The high end models, which use the same titanium alloy used on the space shuttle, cost up to $ 100. Last year, the old dog with new tricks sold 50 million, eclipsing the 1962 record of 42 million. Many other toys are also expected to yo back similarly.