Given a sequence x of points in the unit interval, we associate with it a virtual permutation w = w(x) (that is, a sequence w of permutations w _n ∈ G fraktur sign_n such that for all n = 1, 2, . . ., w_n-1 = w_n ^l is obtained from w_n by removing the last element n from its cycle). We introduce a detailed version of the well-known stick breaking process generating a random sequence x. It is proved that the associated random virtual permutation w(x) has a Ewens distribution. Up to subsets of zero measure, the space G fraktur sign ^∞ = lim_← G fraktur sign_n of virtual permutations is identified with the cube [0,1]^∞.