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The Secrecy Order
In August 2024 the Patent and Trademark Office sealed our ARD patent application at the request of the Navy. On our attorney's advice we pulled the product from the store and took every photo of it off the site and our social accounts. The order was rescinded 27 days later. Enough people have told us we made this up that we decided to put the documents and the explanation in one place.
What happened
Fourteen months after we filed, the file went dark
We filed a patent application on the ARD on June 16, 2023. There was nothing unusual about the filing. Every patent application submitted in the United States gets screened for national security implications when it comes in, and almost all of them clear without the applicant ever knowing the review happened.
Ours didn't clear. On August 16, 2024 we received a Secrecy Order issued under 35 U.S.C. 181, with the Navy listed as the sponsoring agency. The order withheld publication of the application, barred us from disclosing what was in it to anyone outside a short list of government personnel, and pulled the file out of the electronic system into paper storage in a secured location.
Our attorney's read was to assume the worst until we knew better. The order prohibits disclosing the subject matter of the application, the penalties attached to that are criminal, and nobody could tell us with confidence where the line sat between the application and the object it described. So we took the ARDs off the store, stripped every photo of them off the site, and pulled the posts down off Instagram. For most of a month Covert Arms sold nothing and looked like it had never built an ARD. That was our decision and not an instruction from anybody, and it's the part of this that actually cost us something.
We wrote back and made a simple argument. The design was already in commerce. We had been building and shipping it for a long time, to customers in every state and to a number of countries overseas. Whatever was described in that application was already sitting in people's safes and on their rifles. There was nothing left to contain.
On September 12, 2024 the order was rescinded and normal prosecution resumed. That's the whole story. It is a stranger thing to have happen than it is a complicated one.
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16 June 2023
Application filed. Routine national security screening on receipt, same as every application.
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16 Aug 2024
Secrecy Order issued under 35 U.S.C. 181. Sponsoring agency: Navy. Publication withheld, disclosure prohibited, file converted to paper and secured.
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Aug 2024
On counsel's advice we delisted every ARD, removed the product photography from the site, and took the posts down off social. Nobody ordered us to. It was the conservative read.
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Aug to Sept 2024
We responded, pointing out the device had been on the open market and shipping worldwide for some time.
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12 Sept 2024
Order rescinded. Prosecution continued. One of 40 rescissions issued nationwide that fiscal year.
The documents
Both letters, as we received them
We've blacked out the inventor name, our attorney's information, and the serial number. Everything else is untouched.
If you want to check the paperwork itself, PTOL-90A and PTOL-216 are standard USPTO forms with revision dates printed in the footer, and the numbers on the pages are the real Licensing and Review line at (571) 272-8203 and Technology Center 3600 at (571) 272-5150.
The mechanism
What a secrecy order actually does
If you've never run into one of these it sounds invented, so it's worth explaining plainly. The Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, 35 U.S.C. 181 through 188, lets the head of a defense agency notify the Commissioner for Patents that publishing a given application would be detrimental to national security. When that notice comes in, the Commissioner has to issue the order.
From there the application stops moving. No publication, no patent grant. Disclosing the subject matter outside the permitted list can void the application outright and carries criminal penalties under section 186. The order runs for one year and renews annually for as long as the sponsoring agency keeps saying it needs to. Some have been renewed since the 1950s. There's an appeal path to the Secretary of Commerce, and a provision for compensation if the government uses the invention while it's sealed.
One passage in the order is worth repeating, because people find it and think it's a gotcha. The order states that it shouldn't be read to mean the government has adopted or plans to adopt the invention, and that it isn't an indication of the invention's value or that the subject matter is classified.
That's boilerplate printed on every order issued. What it doesn't change is that somebody with the authority to make the call read the application and decided the public shouldn't.
For scale
How often this happens
The USPTO publishes these figures every year. This is fiscal year 2024, the year ours was issued and lifted.
USPTO invention secrecy statistics, FY2024, compiled by the Federation of American Scientists.
Ours was one of the 40. Most of these orders don't come off, and the ones that do usually take years. The reason ours moved quickly is the same reason we argued it in the first place. You can't seal a thing that's already on the market.
The part we're keeping
We're not saying what the application covered
The question we get after every version of this story is which part of the ARD the application was actually about. We're not answering that one.
It isn't that we can't. The order came off in 2024 and we're free to talk. We'd rather not. Prosecution is still live, and publishing a map of exactly which element we're protecting doesn't do anything for us that we want done. What we'll confirm is that it's a functional element of the device rather than the look of it, and that it's on every unit we ship.
People are welcome to guess.
Questions we get
Straight answers
Did the government ban your ARDs?
No, and the distinction is worth getting right. A secrecy order applies to a patent application. It doesn't reach out and pull a product off a shelf, and nobody instructed us to stop selling anything.
We stopped on our own. The order prohibits disclosing the subject matter of the application, the penalties for getting that wrong are criminal, and our attorney couldn't draw a confident line between the document and the object described in it. Under that kind of uncertainty you take the cautious read and sort it out afterward. So the ARDs came down off the store, the photos came off the site, and the posts came off Instagram until it was resolved.
If you went looking for one in late August 2024 and found an empty store, that's why.
How do I know the documents are real?
Check them. The statute is on the U.S. Code site. PTOL-90A and PTOL-216 are standard USPTO forms and the revision dates are printed at the bottom of each page. The two phone numbers on the documents are published USPTO lines. The annual statistics are public. Nothing here depends on you trusting us.
Why would this land on something already being sold?
Because screening looks at the application, not at the sales record. A patent application is written to teach someone how to build the thing and explain why it works the way it does. A product in a box doesn't do that. That difference is most of the answer, and it's also why the order came off as fast as it did once we made the point.
Are you allowed to post these?
Yes. The prohibition ended when the order was rescinded in September 2024. These are our own documents, redacted for identifying details.
Does this mean your ARDs work better than everyone else's?
It means one agency read our application closely and had a reaction to it. Take from that what you want. We'd rather you judge the product on how it fits your optic and what it does to your glass in the sun, which are things you can verify yourself in an afternoon.
Built for one optic at a time
Thirty six optic-specific fits and counting. If yours isn't listed, tell us what you're running and we'll look at it.