To be fair, the NSA is doing what they've always done. It's more like a failure of every president and congress to address the changes in who uses electronic communications since the early 90s. Now the expansion of the NSA's surveillance programs in the last few years is different, not in what they're doing, just in how much. It's hard not to give responsibility for that to people currently running things.
Of course, if the NSA can do it with the technology we have today, the yeerks certainly could have been monitoring wireless communications across most of the world when the books were written. They even did this in Visser when they first showed up on the planet. I think the biggest change would be that the anis wouldn't be able to carry any kind of cell phone with them when doing anything save the world related. Which would be a problem for Jake if his brother notices he never answers his phone when the yeerks get attacked.
It's been a pretty long time for there to be a conference on the war on terror. I mean, look at Syria, there are terrorist groups making a decent bid to take power in the country, a brutal dictator, and the largest chemical weapon strike since Saddam used them against Iran and the Kurds. There wasn't enough international public support for an airstrike. I think an international conference today would almost certainly be on economic stability or climate change. Seems ironic that (in the animorphs universe) a conference on saving the world would be used by the yeerks to destroy it.
I agree with AB on drones. The yeerks would have that technology, maybe not the numbers humans could put up, but they're at least a 100 years more advanced than technology today.
I think the biggest impact technology today would have is how much data the yeerks would have to sift through. It's an overwhelming amount today, so it's hard to tell if the yeerks would be able to really analyze everything even with they're computers.