One further difference, if I understand what I've read correctly, is that Wide Receiver was conducted with the knowledge and cooperation of the Mexican government. (Which may have contributed to its failure, but that's another story for another discussion on another day.) F&F not only did not involve tracking devices, it also left both the Mexican authorities AND the U.S. agents in Mexico completely out of the loop.
I don't understand how any of these twits expect us to believe that the goal was to track the weapons to cartel big-wigs when there was NO mechanism in place, no ASSETS in place, to do any tracking once the guns left the store. The only follow-up was tracing the guns back to the U.S. after they were recovered at crime scenes, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that's exactly what the purpose of the program was -- to inflate the number of crime guns that could be traced to sales in U.S. gun shops.
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