For all the talk since 2016 of foreign election interference and Russian “meddling,” it seems few people really understand the information war and how not to play into the hands of our enemies. Last week is proof.

Last week, The Times and others reported that intelligence officials warned House lawmakers that Russia was trying to get President Trump re-elected. On Friday we learned the interference was bipartisan: The Washington Post first reported that Senator Bernie Sanders was briefed by U.S. officials that Russia was “attempting to help” his campaign as well.

Both reports were understandably alarming and dominated headlines. And yet they offered very little information about the scope of the interference. Here’s all we know, days later: Donald Trump berated the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, for holding the briefing. A Times story said that “current and former officials speculated that the briefing might have played a role” in Mr. Maguire’s recent replacement as director. We also know that Senator Sanders condemned any Russian meddling while also using the news to take pressure off his online supporters (a subject that came up in last week’s debate). “Some of the ugly stuff on the Internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters,” he said.

But there’s a lot more we don’t know about this Russian interference, including: What exactly do these intelligence officials mean by “interference”? Is it an uptick in the garden-variety attempts to sow discord via fake social media accounts or large, hyperpartisan Facebook groups or pages? Or is it a deeper, more sophisticated attempt at infiltrating electronic elections systems? Both? Did officials feel compelled to brief lawmakers because they noticed an anomaly in the volume of inauthentic accounts or posts? Or because of tactics they’d never seen before? We don’t know, and officials can’t even seem to agree on the scope of the meddling.